Book Review: The City Grump rides out

For three decades or so, Stephen Hazell-Smith was one of the City’s most successful and genial of fund managers, cutting something of a dash around the Square Mile with his fabulous Asterix-style moustache.

He was a champion of Britain’s smallest companies and one of the three founders of the LSE’s junior market, the Alternative Investment Market. He has helped thousands of investors plough millions of pounds into backing hundreds of the UK’s best and brightest entrepreneurs.

Behind that charming exterior, though, raged no little fury. His was a white hot fury directed against the absurd and idiotic behaviour of many of our political and business masters who he reckoned were messing up the economy.

Year after year, he watched as our Prime Ministers, our Chancellors, Bank of England governors and our regulators did everything they could to hinder Britain’s natural entrepreneurial spirit with mind-boggling regulations, helping to kill off the UK’s once great equity culture.

Rather than disappear to the beach or the golf-course, when Hazell-Smith retired from full-time investing he turned himself into a City version of Victor Meldrew. Using the City Grump nom de plume as his mask, he poured out his heart – and plenty of bile – into weekly columns for Real Business.

The result is a new book, City Grump Rides Out, which is a collection of the sharpest and funniest of the essays he has written over the last nine years.The book’s cover of Hazell-Smith, riding his white charger resplendent in armour, by the brilliant cartoonist, Gerald Scarfe, is scarily on target.

City Grump takes no prisoners. His favourite villains include our Maybot, the Prime Minister. He holds her utterly responsible for the chaos we are in, while both Philip Hammond, the Chancellor and George Osborne, the former Chancellor and now editor of the Evening Standard, come in for some of the best skewering for their failure to understand SMEs and for strangling the equity markets with more than four lots of tax and all the wrong regulations.

As he puts it: “Until the Treasury starts recruiting more staff who actually have experience of what they are talking about, SMEs and their supporters will continue to whistle Dixie.”

An arch Brexiteer, he takes a particular delight in pricking the pomposity of Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, whose reporting he claims has failed in its duty to cover the UK’s start-ups and smallest company sector and for its fanatical “Remoaner” stance. Indeed, Hazell-Smith’s letters to the Financial Times – written over the years in his own name – criticising the paper’s ivory tower arrogance would make a hilarious follow-up book in themselves.

And don’t even mention Jean-Claude Juncker to him. What City Grump has to say about the EU president would not have passed the libel lawyers in the mainstream press. In fact, working out which political or business leader City Grump is grumpiest about is one of the joys of reading his essays.

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, probably comes out top.  On October 31 2016, City Grump asked this: “Is Mark Carney the most dangerous man in Britain?” We can safely say the answer is a yes as he goes on to thunder that Carney’s decision to slash interest rates in the August of that year was “criminally irresponsible.. and that “even the lowliest foreign exchange dealer realises sterling is a one way bet when Mark Carney cuts and Janet Yellen from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is going the other way.”

As you can tell, the Grump has a low opinion of central bankers, particularly those of Canadian origin: “ I think markets and most people post 2008 stopped regarding the governor of the BoE as some sort of deity. As Mandy said in Life of Brian: “e’s not the Messiah, e’s a very naughty boy”. You get the drift.

City Grump Rides Out should be on the table in the receptions of all financial firms and on the desks of its regulators across the Square Mile and in Whitehall as a reminder that someone, somewhere, is watching them and waiting to take up their pen.

City Grump Rides Out is published by Matador and is available on Amazon