The wheel had turned. It was time to pay for the broken promises. Across Britain people watched their TV screens in awe as powerful bankers sat cowed before a parliamentary committee. The scene vaguely resembled a Star Chamber court, or a Stalinist show trial, where the fallen, recently powerful, confessed and were tried for their crimes. This was not for all that held in some grim secret prison, but in the cradle of British democracy, before the cameras of an agape world. Regretfully there would be no sentencing, and to the disappointment of a great many, there was not the least risk of a headsman’s axe or a firing squad. The accused bowed their heads, said they were sorry, then flew home in their private jets. Nothing was easier, an act of contrition, three Hail Marys and three Our Fathers and they left the confessional scot-free, their pockets bulging with the hundreds of millions they had extorted from savers and investors, who in addition, as tax payers, would have to foot the bill to bailout their stricken banks.
It was an extraordinary turn of events. Only two or three years earlier the founders of Cool Britannia had reiterated, as they had done so for almost a decade, that the country would never ever again suffer another cycle of boom and bust ― whilst the nation’s carefree subjects enjoyed perhaps the greatest credit powered spending spree in history. Politicians and bankers had told a credulous public almost daily that the boom would go on forever. Each and every one was persuaded the capital tied-up in their modest homes offered a source of new wealth and seemingly unlimited spending power. It made Harold Macmillan’s boast ‘you never had it so good’ look mean.
The sorry band of bankers, perched on the edge of the bench of the accused, lamentably pleaded the crash had been impossible to predict. Conveniently forgetting they had turned a deaf ear to the predictions and warnings of a multitude of serious economists and journalists. Those who had sounded the warning bell well before the onset of the crisis had gone unheeded, derided as contrarian and pisse froides.
Of course bankers had not been alone in their refusal to look reality in the face. New wealth based on property prices had become an everyday story. The boast of new found riches was echoed in every pub, club or Starbucks café, up and down the country, in every smart restaurant and at every chic diner party. Confidence reigned as the nation’s brilliant leader dished out advice to Europe and the rest of the world, urging the shirkers to emulate Cool Britannia’s dazzling model of success. Blair’s grinning face seemed ever present on television screens across the planet as he waged Bush’s wars, vaunting his skills as a leader, as if Britain still led a mighty empire.
It was an undeniable fact that New Labour had encouraged and even urged the greed of bankers. In fact people at every level of British society had been urged to enrich themselves, to grab a piece of the action. Mandelson, Blair’s henchman, led the pack of yapping jackals said: In the modern Labour Party we are relaxed about those who express an insatiable and pathological desire for self-enrichment at the expense of our fellow man that borders on the truly evil, and on another occasion, we are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.
Fitzwilliams squirmed as he watched the sorry show on TV at his home in County Wicklow, thirty kilometres from Dublin. The vast and magnificent family home had been bought by Fitzwilliams’ grandfather before the First World War. It had been originally built by an Anglo-Irish Earl and designed by Richard Cassels in the latter part of the 18th century. The stately home was considered to be one of the finest examples of Palladian architecture in Ireland.
The Fitzwilliams family, one of Ireland’s landed families, had built their fortune in the late 19th century in brewing and property development in Dublin, before branching out into banking in the early nineteen twenties. His grandfather, a keen collector of art, boasted a collection of works by Goya, Vermeer, Peter Paul Rubens and Thomas Gainsborough.
Fitzwilliams’ wife, Alice, was a leading figure in the Irish Thoroughbred Association. Beyond their two children, her interests lay in the family owned stud farm that lay within the borders of their estate. Outside of important horse shows and racing events in the UK, she rarely travelled outside of Ireland. The City of London and the business world held little or no interest for her. As for her husband Michael, he was left to devote all his attention to the bank.
As Fitzwilliams looked beyond the windows of his office, towards the lake and the gentle hills of the Wicklow Mountains, he thanked his lucky stars, he had survived the great debacle. Others had not been, or would not be so lucky. Fortune had smiled upon him and he swore he would never again allow his bank and more specifically his family to be drawn into the kind of desperate situation he had faced in the last frantic months of 2008.