Branson. Tom Bower

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      ‘Mrs Thatcher says she wants to see the boat,’ Branson told his publicists. His coup – calling in favours – was remarkable. No one understood how Branson’s personal telephone call to Margaret Thatcher lured the prime minister on 3 July 1986 to the River Thames to promote Virgin. Standing beside Thatcher, Branson sped at 30 knots, unlawfully fast, under Tower Bridge raised in salute to a British hero. Branson never considered the irony that nine years earlier he had deliberately broken the law on the same river to promote the Sex Pistols, thereby financing his pose next to the Prime Minister. All that mattered was the intoxicating glamour and the media attention. ‘He’s done it,’ screamed the Daily Mail’s headline. ‘Richard the Lionheart,’ worshipped the Daily Express. ‘Pride of the Atlantic’, ‘King of the Waves’, ‘Salute to Challenger’, ‘Towering Triumph’, blared other newspapers.

      In a round-Britain tour, Challenger II docked in harbours to promote Virgin, with Branson making guest appearances. His presence was hailed by ordinary people as historic. Virgin shops reported record sales. Cheered as a national hero, Branson swelled with the adulation. Virgin, he mused, had become more than merely a player. The company had entered the nation’s folklore and he had been anointed an icon. Reality chose that inappropriate moment to bite back.

      ‘The fans are puking about you and Thatcher,’ Jeremy Lascelles, Virgin Music’s A&R manager, told Branson with an unexpected grimace hours after his return to his office. ‘It’s all very unhelpful with the bands too. They loathe Thatcher.’ Branson was shocked. Thatcherism – the encouragement of entrepreneurship, the privatisation of state industries and the moral legitimacy of wealth – enabled his success and he had occasionally accepted invitations to Downing Street. The ‘hippie tycoon’ and classless toff whose popular appeal straddled social barriers, had never revealed his sympathy for Margaret Thatcher. ‘Most young people in Britain are like me,’ he scoffed. ‘We are more popular than you think.’ Momentarily, Lascelles was puzzled. ‘We,’ Lascelles mused. ‘What does he mean “We”?’ Moments later, Lascelles, a charming musician, believed he understood. Branson was apparently speaking royally. ‘We can do no wrong,’ Branson repeated. ‘You see,’ he told Lascelles, ‘the press are treating us favourably.’ Reality and illusion merged in the hero’s mind, often incoherently. After again posing for newspaper photographers with his children, he pontificated, ‘I would never involve my family with the press.’ Overwhelmed by the celebrity, he could not imagine that an assistant was struggling to persuade musicians to appear in an edition of This Is Your Life to celebrate Branson. ‘People don’t want to know,’ Sian Davis, a publicist, moaned. ‘Even the Human League’s manager said “No”.’

      The television programme possibly contributed another subtle change of the chameleon’s colour. The new image was modesty. He eschewed expensive cars, preached that he flew economy class – ‘the extra comfort is not worth the extra cost,’ scoffed the owner of an airline seeking business class passengers – and espoused a carefully refined casual style. With echoes of his sixties credo, Branson chose to speak again as the champion of the people. His natural nonchalance was commercially advantageous. The star had become a valuable commodity. Major corporations were seeking Branson’s endorsement in advertisements. In the new yuppie era, socialism was discredited and wealth was no longer sinful. Branson as the classless, benevolent rags to riches tycoon compared well with the suffocating grandeur of his competitors. But the reality was a lifestyle of extraordinary opulence in a life divided between a large house in Notting Hill, Mill End, his country house in Oxfordshire, and Necker, expensively developed by the company.

      Hosting parties at the weekend, organising endless sports competitions, ample food and wine and free foreign holidays satisfied Branson’s need for entertainment. Jeremy Lascelles, Chris Moss, Simon Draper and many others loved Branson. He guaranteed fun. Few of the chosen jesters could recall what their host actually said but the safety of numbers protected everyone from boredom. Even a growing habit towards exaggeration – ‘How I signed the Sex Pistols’ – was tolerated. The prankster, placing himself at the centre of attention, conjured scenarios exalting his courage: ‘As I bobbed up and down in the Atlantic in a life raft,’ he prattled, ‘I had this vision of Virgin as the largest entertainment group in the world outside the United States.’

      Deluded by his own propaganda and the popular hero-worship, he convinced himself that his business and his methods were sufficiently robust to withstand the scrutiny of outsiders. Fatefully, he decided to ask the public not only for their adoration but also for their money.