RATNER & THE BOTTOM LINE

Difficult to miss Gerald Ratner at the Royal Albert Hall last week returning to the scene of the crime. The epic brick-drop which saw the Ratner brand trashed Hiroshima-style by a couple of careless comments from its Chief Executive is the stuff of legend. Ratner, remember, was being amazingly successful at the time of his gaffe. Over confident, and indeed, showing off, he must have had no concept of the furies he unleashed.

In under 10 years he had transformed a business with 130 stores and sales of £13m to a public company with 2,500 stores, 25,000 employees, the brands H Samuel and Ernest Jones, and profits of £121m, no mean sum today, but a vast amount in the early nineties.
But describing a sherry decanter as ‘total crap’ in a 30-minute speech to 6,000 directors cost him his personal fortune, his job, wiped an estimated £500m off the company’s value and turned the profits into a £122m loss. His family-named business was also re-christened ‘Signet’. A lifetime’s work catastrophically ruined overnight.
He’d been making the same comments in his speeches, more or less, for five years, but in 1992 the Daily Mirror, vigorously pursuing its anti-Fat Cat agenda, received an advance copy of his speech from the IOD and, sensing a story, had a reporter there to verify that Ratner uttered the immortal words. It chose his line as the cover splash the next day.
The Sun then matched its fiercest rival in later editions and a media circus ensued. “They didn’t let go, and never let go. I understand they’ve got to add a bit of spice. I just kick myself that I gave them the ammunition.”
Making any come-back, as Peter Mandelson knows, is not an easy option. The guns lie in wait, and everyone prepares the “He’s done it again!” side of the story with relish. Liverpool have just made it through to the European Cup final amid scenes of hysteria more suited to having actually won the blessed trophy, instead of the semi-final, but it’s been so long everyone’s up for it – and that’s where Gerald Signet may yet score: the received view now is that he was just a bit of a cheeky chappy who deserved being taken down a peg by the noble red-tops, but no one meant him to get seriously hurt.
Ratner is wiser, greyer, poorer, older, chastened…oh dear, it all sounds very unexciting, and completely at odds with the image he used to project, which while not to everyone’s taste (like his “jewellery”) was at least meant to be fun and upbeat and modern. His strengths – youth, energy, ultimate Thatcherite confidence – are now all but absent, so it’s going to be interesting to see whether he still has the most important of his attributes still intact – the ability to make money. After all, he’s a businessman, and if he was once famous for being something else, that’s all the world will really care about nowadays: the bottom line. And that’s somewhere Gerald Ratner has been before.