Branson. Tom Bower

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      ‘He plucks,’ Eve Branson admitted innocently, ‘what he wants out of you.’ From his office on the top floor, Branson was part of the gang yet avoided immersion in his own party. While the guests played downstairs, he was focused on the fortunes of his magazine. ‘He was like a country squire,’ recalled Sue Steward, an early employee. ‘We were having a party and all living together but it was always on his estate. You always knew he owned it all. He wasn’t really a hippie, ever.’ Enjoying the sex, ignoring the music, occasionally living in a haze of marijuana, he acknowledged expressions of loyalty and developed the notion that his magazine should become the vehicle for his financial independence.

      Profiting from the magazine could have presented a dilemma. After all, he touted Student to contributors and advertisers as a philanthropic venture to help poor youth. Among articulate students at the end of the 1960s, the public good rather than personal benefit was the only justification for business. Profits were incompatible with ideals. But Branson was not plagued by the self-doubts infecting so many students of the sixties revolution. He believed in profit and any contradictions were easily brushed aside by fluent self-invention. Sensitive to the mood of the time, Branson convinced himself and others that all his commercial ventures were for society’s ‘good’. The rebellious public school boy adhered to the credo that his ambitions were for his employees’ benefit. Earning money was not a sin, if conducted in the proper manner. But it was preferable to always pronounce, ‘I haven’t gone into business to make money. I like the challenge.’ Combined with his blokeish ordinariness, it was a disarming performance. Connaught Publications, his unregistered company, never published accounts. None of the blissed-out party-goers in Albion Street were sure whether their employer earned profits, let alone how much. Secrecy, Branson learned to appreciate, was preferable to public disclosure and even the existence of that secrecy required concealment. His guests witnessed a performance in which the magazine became the passport to his next incarnation.

      Influenced by violent agitation across Europe and America, especially against the war in Vietnam, the baby boomers were trashing traditions in confrontations with university administrators, police and politicians. Students, congregating around the London School of Economics, were immersed in an extraordinary political revolution. Although younger than the undergraduates and not having enrolled as a student, Branson purposefully attached himself to the politicised and articulate agitators as an equal. Among the real activists, the serious-looking youth disguising his comfortable background as the grandson of a judge appeared no different from the thousands of other protestors. Understandably, Branson did not reveal that he was neither left-wing nor understood the political feuds raging among the multitude of student factions in the midst of the Cold War. Branson’s natural style implied that he sympathised with the spirit of the times and that he shared the common goal of an egalitarian, classless meritocracy. For Tariq Ali and the other leading Marxists who were preoccupied by endless political arguments and organising perpetual demonstrations, the credentials or motives of any young person hovering silently on the fringe of their turbulence passed unquestioned. But while Ali and others would remain permanently oblivious to Branson, the interloper himself, searching for a niche, exploited his presence at a decisive moment of history.

      Unmoved by politics or history, Branson none the less spotted a financial advantage which eluded those participants preoccupied with moral conflicts. Skilfully, by walking with the leaders of London’s huge demonstration against the Vietnam War, he positioned himself in 1968 as the editor and owner of Student magazine, and as a ‘Students’ Spokesman’. Newspaper photographs recorded Branson among the leaders of the march. While most demonstrators ended that day of protest bitter about police violence and frustrated by the state’s inhumanity, he had absorbed an invaluable insight into the new fickleness of the era.

      Journalists dispatched by middle-aged Fleet Street editors to report and explain the student revolt, searched for a spokesman. Branson was discovered in Albion Street. Stepping over rubbish, unsold copies of Student magazine and couples sleeping on the floor, one grateful reporter bestowed credibility on his interviewee by lazily repeating Branson’s self-description as a ‘student leader’ and faithfully quoting his utterances in a London newspaper.

      Mention as a ‘student leader’ in one newspaper brought invitations to appear on television and feature in Vogue magazine as a representative of Britain’s student rebellion. To enhance his apparent importance for visiting journalists, he arranged for friends to telephone the house from call boxes, creating an illusion of successful activity. Journalists, Branson realised, were unlikely to challenge his exaggerated claims for Student’s success or his personal importance. On the contrary, the more outrageous his assertions the better. A single pose alongside Tariq Ali during the demonstration had taught Branson the value of hype.

      At eighteen Branson possessed star-quality. His jocular celebrity persuaded the unambitious living in his basement and seeking justification for their fun-seeking lifestyle to accept his argument for their common goals. Their dependence upon him was gratifying to Branson but also troubling. Student’s circulation remained low and static. It was his first taste of a recurring predicament throughout his life: a cash crisis. His solution was to borrow an idea.

      To save Student he imitated Private Eye. Regularly, the satirical magazine promoted its Christmas edition by attaching a record on to its cover. Branson’s idea for his magazine’s issue in spring 1969 was inspired. In October 1968, he approached Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ press officer, requesting an interview and a special song recorded by John Lennon dedicated to Britain’s students. Ingratiating himself by focusing polite charm on his targets was Branson’s particular skill and Taylor agreed. But by early December, after commissioning an expensive cover design and placing a large printing order, the record had still not materialised. Sitting in Taylor’s office, helping him address Christmas cards, Branson pressed for delivery. Taylor, proud of fulfilling his pledges, had a problem. Lennon had been prosecuted for the possession of cannabis and Yoko Ono, his girlfriend, had just miscarried. Traumatised, the couple had isolated themselves in their house outside London. Impulsively, Taylor scribbled on a card, ‘Trust me, Derek.’ Carefully, Branson pocketed the card.

      At the beginning of January 1969, the promised record had not been delivered. Branson’s own despair deprived him of any sympathy for Lennon. After consulting his father, he issued his first writ: Connaught Publications v. John and Yoko Lennon and Derek Taylor. The official document, alleging breach of contract, was served on Taylor in the street outside his office. Listed as proof of an agreement was Taylor’s scribble on the Christmas card. The writ established that sentiment would never interfere with Branson’s urge to earn money. His verbal awkwardness, his long hair and his broken glasses might have suggested a hapless, easy-going hippie but they were just the natural props in a well-marketed performance. At dinner that night John Varnom asked about the writ. ‘My father’s a judge,’ replied Branson inaccurately, suggesting that the mighty ranks of the British Establishment endorsed his behaviour. Varnom withheld any correction. Branson’s grandfather was a judge and, ever since an old gamekeeper on the family’s lost estate had tugged his forelock to the young boy, Branson had mirrored his mother’s determination to regain his family’s lost social status: for the next fifteen years he would not correct newspaper quotations that ‘My father is the sixth in line in a family of judges.’

      In April 1969, Branson, Taylor and their lawyers met in Savile Row to finally take delivery of a tape provided by Lennon. It was the heartbeat of Yoko’s baby which ended in silence. ‘That’s when it died,’ announced Taylor. Branson never used the recording and abandoned his writ. By then, Student had flopped. Outsold by his more original competitors, Branson had exhausted his charitable sales patter to contributors and suppliers.

      Marooned in Albion Street, Richard Branson was a trader in search of a commodity. Downstairs were the friends and tenants who enjoyed the loose lifestyle and, while talented, shared none of his material ambition. Which was precisely why they were partying untroubled by their low wages. СКАЧАТЬ