Jim Armitage: Why bankers will not be hopping it to President Macron's France now
Tired of fog? Join the frogs. Remember that? The cringeworthy French government slogan hoping to get big City banks to relocate staff to Paris after Brexit.
Some bosses were tempted: former Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein marvelled at the food, others loved the one-to-one charm offensives with president Macron or his wily finance minister Bruno Le Maire. France is changing, they were told. The days of farmers blocking the streets with pyres of burning meat and tyres are over. We love private enterprise, we adore rich bankers.
How foolish that looks now. Macron may have believed his promises, but France was not ready to reform. The gilets jaunes’ violence on Paris’s streets has made that plain. The spark was fuel tax, but Macron’s liberalisation measures were the gunpowder in the barrel beneath.
Now, entirely predictably, he has given up. Like so many reformists before him, he has buckled under pressure from the Paris streets. His leadership, so promising when he swept to power, is neutered.
Add into that mix the rising anti-Semitism in France (almost 80% say it has “increased a lot”) and you can see why so few banks are seriously considering sending UK staff there.
The Join the Frogs campaign was risible because it suggested London was still mired in the smogs of the 1950s. Britain has moved on since then. France, less so.
WPP
WPP’s Mark Read should have a word with himself. He’s running a company that’s supposed to help businesses communicate with ordinary folk.
Yet today, he gives us hundreds of words of jargon and twaddle, culminating in the claim that he’s turning WPP into a “creative transformation company”. What would the late, great adman David Ogilvy make of that? Cut through the platitudes, though, and Read has a plan; chop jobs and slim down the number of WPP businesses clients have to navigate to get a full service of advertising creatives, marketing, analysis and media buying.
The thing is, none of it seems particularly ambitious.
The restructuring costs (redundancies, to you and me) will be £300 million over three years. As one analyst points out, that’s only £20 million to £30 million more than the usual redundancies bill. Annual savings of £275 million are trifling in a business that’s lost £6 billion of its stock market value since September. As is the £120 million or so he’s talking of reinvesting.
Added to which, much of the simplification isn’t that different to moves already in train. Read presumably plans to under-promise and over-deliver so he can pleasantly surprise investors.
But I’d have liked something more radical, and more detail on how confident Read is of winning and retaining clients. On that score WPP’s record lately is patchy. These things have a momentum of their own; it’s not clear that is going WPP’s way.
