Branson. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ to protect my business,’ soothed Branson, glossing over the dishonesty. ‘I’m just starting. How can I put all this right? We’re all human beings.’ In that strange British guise, his disarming performance and his social confidence bestowed a veneer of decency.

      The officers’ procedure could not be changed. Fearful that a hippie would disappear, they had decided upon an arrest rather than a summons. Once in Dover, there was no alternative but to place Branson in jail overnight before his appearance in court the following morning.

      At daybreak, the lobbying of Brown and Knox was resumed by Eve, Branson’s forty-eight-year-old mother, and the dominant influence in his life. Sitting with Ted, her husband, introduced as a barrister and stipendiary magistrate, Eve Branson glanced at her dishevelled and depressed son. ‘Now officers,’ cooed the former air hostess, ‘how can we sort this out?’ Eve’s dignity and class confirmed Knox’s and Brown’s opinion that this was an exceptional case. ‘We’d like to arrange bail,’ said Eve, ‘and settle this amicably. He’s only twenty years old. He’s been very foolish and it’s unnecessary that his life should be ruined by a criminal conviction. He’ll repay the taxes and any fine but we’d prefer to keep it out of the court.’ The absence of an aggressive solicitor and the impressive honesty of the Branson family persuaded the officers to consider a deal. ‘Have you got the money for bail?’ asked Brown.

      ‘No,’ replied Eve, ‘but we’ll put up our house, our only home.’

      The normally cynical officers were impressed. ‘And we’ll guarantee the repayment of the taxes and the fine,’ continued Eve, ‘even if we have to sell our home.’ After a suitable pause, she added, alarmed that twenty years of loving ambition were on the verge of disintegration, ‘He’s very young. He should be given a second chance.’

      Knox and Brown agreed. This was a genuine, one-off error. There would be a brief court appearance to set bail at £30,000 secured on the family home. The young Branson would be released without further prosecution. ‘No publicity?’ urged Eve.

      ‘Absolutely,’ promised Knox. Customs were always discreet.

      In the following weeks, meeting Branson on the Duende, his houseboat just purchased for £200 and moored in Little Venice, Brown set out the terms of the settlement proposed by his superiors. The investigations had by then revealed the sophisticated nature of Branson’s fraud. Contacting the customers across Europe and America listed on Branson’s export certificates, the investigators discovered that none of those named had ever bought records from Caroline. ‘The scam’s enormous,’ a Customs official declared.

      ‘You owe us £40,000 in back taxes and we are charging a £20,000 fine,’ announced Brown. Just after Branson’s twenty-first birthday, he owed the modern equivalent of over £500,000.

      ‘I can’t afford that,’ said Branson. ‘Can I pay by instalments?’ After negotiations interrupted by tea, it was agreed that Branson would pay £15,000 immediately and £45,000 in monthly payments of £3,000.

      His crime was too well-known to be concealed, so over the years Branson has presented his illegality as an early watershed in life. The sackcloth and ashes version is: ‘One night in jail teaches you that sleeping well at night is the only thing that really matters. Every single decision since has been made completely by the book.’ That interpretation, however, belied one of his life’s principal credos: ‘I have always enjoyed breaking the rules.’ His prescient headmaster at Stowe had noted that trait, predicting on the eve of the seventeen-year-old’s premature departure from school that Branson would either become a millionaire or go to prison. By twenty-one, he had achieved the latter, albeit briefly. ‘He appears modest,’ Mike Knox would reflect at the end of his investigation, ‘with a disarming personality offering to help everybody. But he’s got this ruthless ambition.’

      Once Branson had begun to court celebrity as a millionaire tycoon, he progressively introduced distortions to minimise the gravity of the fraud. In 1984, he mentioned that he was ‘only eighteen’ when the embarrassment occurred rather than nearly twenty-one. The following year he described his ‘eighteen-year-old fraud’ as occurring ‘only three times’ before his arrest at the port on the third occasion. In 1986, he told the Sun that he escaped imprisonment, ‘by convincing the court that he didn’t know it was illegal’. Two years later, in 1988, he chose another variation for Mick Brown, his first biographer, recounting that he personally drove four times through the Customs post at Dover before he was caught. His version in 1992 conjured a sophisticated tale about shipping worthless titles and empty boxes to the Continent for ‘one month’ after discovering himself to be penniless after investing in his mail order business, his shops and the new manor recording studio in Oxfordshire. In truth, the shops and the recording studio were partly financed by the fraud. ‘I had a pile of debt and no real money,’ he truthfully admitted. By 1994, as the owner of a famous international airline, Branson excused himself from the whole enterprise saying: ‘I had not realised the rules.’ In his autobiography in 1998, Branson offered another explanation: there were only three trips, he wrote, starting in spring 1971 to cover debts of £35,000 and ‘big operators’ were far worse. All those variations were a smokescreen. He had simply played the game and, unforgivably, he had lost.

      Over Sunday lunch at the manor with his staff after his arrest, Branson expounded his credo. ‘We weren’t doing any harm,’ he said. ‘No one was hurt. Customs is only an organisation. If organisations get robbed, it’s not a problem because they’ve got lots of money. Too much money, which should be handed around.’ Listening to his own espousal of the morality of the righteous underdog, Branson warmed to his theme. Hitting the big boys was justifiable because they were pirates and doing harm to the small people like Virgin. Lying was virtuous if a ‘non-profit’ group helping society was the beneficiary. His cabal did not disapprove. Deceit, they agreed, was acceptable in business. His forgery of a letter and an invoice from a non-existent American company to suggest that he was an innocent victim in the sale of bootleg records defied contradiction. Surrounded by employees who approved his dishonesty, Branson was classed as a rebel thumbing his nose at the Establishment. Taking money from the government, they agreed with Branson, was a lark and, considering all the rogues in the City, lying was not only acceptable but virtuous for the ‘victim’ and the ‘champion of youth’.

       2 The beginning

      The first ruse was simple and saved money. ‘Operator,’ berated the grating upper class voice, ‘I’ve put money into this pay phone and it hasn’t worked.’

      ‘Sorry, sir, I’ll connect you.’

      The second ruse, spoken from the telephone box, was more sophisticated. ‘I’m Richard Branson. I’m eighteen and I run a magazine called Student that’s doing something really useful for young people.’ The caller was sixteen and Student was no more than an idea.

      The third ruse was crude. The impatient bearer of six mediocre ‘O’ level passes, who had cheated in exams by secreting a crib sheet in the palm of his left hand, proposed that his father should write to Stowe’s headmaster explaining that his son wanted to prematurely leave the school to study law at university and enter politics. In fact, unwilling to study either for ‘A’ levels or a university degree, Richard Branson wanted to launch Student magazine. Ted Branson refused to lie but reluctantly agreed his son should leave the school. Thirty years later, journalists would, after interviewing the tycoon, mistakenly believe that the teenager had left Stowe because ‘Student magazine was successful’. The youth’s precocious confidence to make his fortune without an education owed much to an unusually dominant mother’s extraordinary gestures.

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