on a houseboat oh the Regent’s Canal, he and Joan once returned from a weekend away to find that the boat had flooded and sunk. Yet Branson had no regrets to discover that all his worldly goods had been lost – for he knew that his photograph album, which was more precious to him than anything that mere money could buy, was safely stored somewhere else. Proof of how little his attitude has changed can be seen in his decision to put the two houses in Holland Park on the market at the turn of 1994 with a price-tag of £15m, and to start looking for another houseboat so that his family could move back to the canal from which he started twenty years ago.
Indeed, most of Richard Branson’s pleasures could be enjoyed just as easily without great riches. He loves tennis and swimming in the sea; underlying his boating and ballooning in the second half of the 1980s were great reserves of physical courage, which allowed him several times to face death without panic. He plays practical jokes that are more physical than intellectual – throwing people into swimming-pools, dressing up in bra and suspenders at parties for Virgin employees, pushing cakes into people’s faces in the style of television cartoons. At an airline-industry awards ceremony, he once grabbed hold of Ivana Trump, the former wife of a leading American property billionaire, and turned her upside down in front of hundreds of astonished black-tie guests. It is this humour above all that makes Richard Branson such an object of affection among his employees. The ear-to-ear smile that he wears for so many hours every day conveys a simple message: business is fun.
Underneath this gregariousness is an insecurity. Richard Branson’s lack of verbal fluency was intimately linked to his poor academic record at school, and his decision to leave rather than to go to university. For a man who has made his money in industries that are all about communication and people, Branson is sometimes astonishingly inarticulate. He will talk with passion when his interest is raised, but can be stumped by an utterly straightforward question. During one of the last interviews he gave for this book, Branson took a fifteen-minute break in order to record for a camera crew waiting in his sitting-room a short speech of welcome to a charity dinner that he could not attend. The speech was warm and friendly, conveying all the right points about the charity’s work, and ending with a rousing demand to guests that he would never see to give generously to the appeal at the end of the evening. But its three minutes were punctuated with umms and aahs – hundreds of them, separating not just sentences and phrases but also single words. Despite the decade of practice he has had, and the hundreds of television interviews he has given, Branson remains clearly ill at ease with the spoken word. When he got up at the end of a chat-show interview in 1992 and poured a glass of water over the head of his host, the audience took his action as a joke, and laughed uproariously. They were probably wrong. Emptying the glass of water was more a sign of Richard Branson’s frustration at being outmanoeuvred by the glib questions he had been asked.
If there is one respect in which Branson can fairly claim to have been valued by the public at less than his real worth, it is to do with his charitable activities. He is not a giver of huge sums to charity in the way that some businessmen are; nor does he have to his credit, as the Sainsbury family do, a gift to the cultural life of the nation on the scale of a new wing for the National Gallery. But Branson has been involved in three important projects in which he has attempted to give something back to the community from which he has made his riches. The first was the UK 2000 campaign, a scheme to bring together a number of different government and private initiatives to improve Britain’s environment and to provide useful work experience for the young unemployed. From the very day Branson took on the chairmanship of the campaign, he was dogged with the tabloid misconception that it was nothing more than a litter-picking organisation; his departure from the job a year later, after acres of hostile press coverage, was a relief to himself as well as to his advisers at Virgin.
His second venture for the public good was the launch of Mates, a brand of cut-price condoms intended to shake up the monopoly in the British condom market that allowed the manufacturers of Durex not to advertise. The project was a commercial triumph: the new brand was easily established, and took more than a quarter of the market in less than two years. In terms of public health, however, the outcome was mixed; although condom advertisements were shown on British television for the first time, Mates did little to change the reluctance of young people to take elementary precautions against the spread of AIDS. Branson himself also came in for a good deal of criticism – despite the fact that he had risked large sums of his own money in a venture whose proceeds were intended only for charity.
Branson’s bid to run the National Lottery suffered a similar fate. Once again, his intentions were altruistic; he would take no profits personally from the exercise, and the lottery and the money it raised would be administered by a foundation kept entirely independent of the Virgin empire. Branson was bitterly disappointed when the franchise was instead awarded to a business consortium; but he was angrier still to find himself criticised for his involvement in an exercise for the good of others. Somehow, despite the clear separation of the lottery from his business interests, Branson never quite managed to dispel the suspicion that he was hoping to benefit personally from running it.
Most public figures – politicians and sports stars as well as business people – would be less sensitive. They would expect their motives to be impugned, their failures exaggerated, their successes attacked, their physical characteristics made an object of fun. The very fact that Richard Branson can take such offence is proof of how unaccustomed he is to public criticism, and how he has come to take it for granted that a little effort and imagination in arranging what information is made public will inevitably result in positive coverage.
Achieving good press has been as important in Branson’s business career as making sure that the books balance at the end of the year. From his first days as a magazine publisher and record retailer, Branson knew that descriptions of his ventures as successful and expansionary could become self-fulfilling. That is why he would arrange, when a newspaper journalist came to talk to him, for an employee to go to a nearby telephone box and ring in constantly during the interview in order to give an impression of activity; and why he similarly drafted in a couple of friends to pose as musicians signed to his record label for a television documentary when in fact Virgin Records had no artists at all on its roster. It took two factors, however, to turn Branson from a moderately well known and eccentric pop millionaire into a fully fledged celebrity. One was the launch of Virgin Atlantic, which gave him the opportunity to indulge his taste for dressing up in a series of outlandish outfits. (The apparent thirst for personal publicity which he then acquired had a great deal to do with the need to compete with British Airways on a shoestring advertising budget.) The other factor in his current fame was the danger involved in his record-breaking sea and balloon crossings of the Atlantic and Pacific. In public, Branson would talk about his thirst for adventure and his love of competition and the outdoors. In Virgin board meetings, he defended the spending of company money on these exercises by saying that they were the cheapest possible way of advertising group companies.
By the end of the 1980s, Branson’s image as popular hero had become a bankable asset for his businesses, arguably even more valuable than the Virgin brand name itself. He would be wheeled out to meet rock stars signing contracts with Virgin Music, even though he had not been involved in the negotiations; and they, accustomed to receiving the adulation of fans themselves, would be awed as if they were in the presence of royalty. Four years after he sold Virgin Music, Branson took me on an impromptu tour of the company’s recording studios at Shipton Manor in Oxfordshire. The woman who opened the front door was visibly delighted to see him, and reminded him as they kissed that she had worked for him a decade earlier. When we went into the studio itself, rich in the nostalgic smell of marijuana smoke, the band who were working there took their feet off the desks when he walked in.
One example of the commercial value that Branson squeezes from his own public persona and the strength of the Virgin brand was the air service that City Jet began to operate under the Virgin name between London’s City Airport and Dublin in 1994. Another was the launch in 1993 of a Virgin personal computer, which was in reality being built entirely by a separate company that paid a royalty for use of the Virgin name. Even firms that have no dealings at all with Virgin want to cash
