Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy Page 7

  This literalism in nomenclature has been elegantly avoided by the managers of British Gas. They haven’t changed to “British Gas and Electricity”, “British Energy” or, in tribute to the item they most noticeably provide, “British Bills”. And this certainly isn’t because the firm lacks the cash to rebrand. Like all of the Big Six energy providers, it recently put up the price of its standard variable tariff, meaning that, put together, they’re raking in an extra £570m of revenue per year.

  British Gas is probably my favourite of the Big Six energy providers, but the truth is I love them all. I love how much they irritate politicians and consumer experts. This recent batch of price rises was typical, described by energy minister Claire Perry as “unjustified”, by Gillian Guy of Citizens Advice as “extremely disheartening” and by Alex Neill of Which? as “another slap in the face for customers already feeling the pinch” (but no hope of a tickle), with Martin Lewis, founder of MoneySavingExpert. com, concluding that “Anyone on a Big Six standard tariff is ripping themselves off”.

  I love all this, in the same way that I love it when a paedophile wins the lottery. Both phenomena are such eloquent illustrations of the flaws in their respective systems. And I dislike both systems, so it’s great to give those flaws an airing. Just as a sex criminal randomly winning a fortune makes it clear that lottery balls have no sense of moral justice, the fact that the largest operators in the domestic energy marketplace offer some of the highest tariffs is a peachy demonstration that the forces of market competition aren’t functioning.

  Can you imagine this pattern in any market that worked? A world where the six largest supermarket chains charged more for groceries than their smaller rivals, yet somehow sustained their share of business? Where Amazon secured a dominant online position despite also charging more than other retailers? It couldn’t happen in the presence of genuine market forces, which is conclusive proof that the 25-year experiment in attempting to introduce those forces to the domestic energy market has failed. We’ve given it a massive go, people didn’t like it, they couldn’t be arsed to keep changing supplier, so the time has come to renationalise.

  It’s not very surprising. It never seemed like it would work. If you had 20 or 30 different light switches on every wall, with a price marked on each, then you’d have a market. Obviously, that’s impractical, but hardly more so than expecting millions of consumers to make the running – to research who’s offering the best price, go through the admin hassle of changing supplier, then keep tabs on when prices get automatically hiked if you don’t change, or threaten to change, supplier again. That’s not a very appealing process to anyone mortal.

  So why don’t we just opt once and for all for the one that’s called British Gas? En masse. Embrace the supplier-changing hassle this one time and we’ll never have to do it again. The other suppliers will go under and the state will have to take over to avoid a private monopoly. And no one will nag us to “shop around” ever again. Let’s do it. If you see Sid, tell him.

  In September 2018, three months after this article was published, Kraft Heinz abandoned its plans to rebrand Salad Cream. I’m not saying I’m a hero, but …

  * * *

  The first time I went to Patisserie Valerie, in December 1993, it felt really special. I was having a day out in London during the Christmas vacation after my first term at university, and a college friend, who lived in London, took me to what I for many years wrongly thought of as the original Knightsbridge branch. It seemed extremely refined and continental – the cakes were like the ones that, in those days, you only really got in France. Lots of millefeuilles, no iced buns. To an undergraduate rube, it was a glimpse into the hidden London where only very posh people go.

  I don’t know how many branches of Patisserie Valerie there were in 1993. But it was obviously more than the one Old Compton Street outlet that Enzo, Robert and Victor Scalzo bought in 1987 from descendants of the original Madame Valerie, and fewer than the nine that existed when they sold the firm to venture capitalists in 2006. When it went into administration the other day, there were about 200.

  In early 2018, I went to one of them. It was in the Brunswick Centre, near Russell Square, next to an arthouse cinema. This time, it didn’t feel very special. It was fine, but it was pretty empty. I had a sandwich and a tea while someone swept the floor. But, unlike in 1993, it obviously wasn’t a genuine Belgian patisserie that had been running for the best part of a century. It was just a chain restaurant that had randomly taken “Belgian patisserie” as its vague theme. It could turn into a GBK or a Harry Ramsden’s or a Café Rouge or a Pret or an Eat or a Giraffe at the click of a financier’s mouse.

  It feels so weird and arbitrary. I get no sense that the reason Patisserie Valerie leapt from a handful of branches to hundreds was because of public demand. I suppose there’s a demand for cafes in general, but I don’t think many people were saying, “You know the distinctive feel of that cake shop in Old Compton Street? If only that were available literally everywhere!” I don’t think people outside London had particularly heard of it – it wasn’t like Hamley’s or Fortnum & Mason. They were just suddenly presented with it. “That Zizzi’s turned into something called Patisserie Valerie.” “Oh. Do they still do cappuccinos?” “I suppose so.”

  And it doesn’t make sense even if there did turn out to be a vast unexploited market for the very specific Belgian-metropolitan ambience I enjoyed in 1993, because a chain of Patisserie Valerie’s scale and nature is incapable of replicating that sort of atmosphere – as I discovered at the Brunswick Centre. It’s not like McDonald’s, which, whether you like it or not, you have to admit is pretty much the same everywhere. In this case, the original successful thing is too ephemeral to be recaptured by a team of local staff taken on when the TGI Friday’s closed.

  I’m not saying this is why the chain failed. The current crisis was precipitated by the discovery last October of “significant, potentially fraudulent accounting irregularities”, which meant there was a £40m gap in its accounts. Until then, everything looked rosy, with Patisserie Holdings, the parent company, valued at over half a billion pounds in June. But it’s hard to believe that that wasn’t a huge overestimation of its worth and that there isn’t a fundamental weakness in the business motivating all the alleged books-cooking.

  I first properly noticed the weird way the restaurant business currently operates when the Ask Pizza near me changed overnight into something called Franco Manca. It still seemed to be a restaurant, but I had no idea what sort. I initially assumed it was something vaguely Spanish, which was stupid of me, as that would be like a Viennese restaurant calling itself Hitler Mitlo.

  My confusion wasn’t eased when I discovered that Franco Manca, like Ask Pizza before it, is a pizza restaurant – the main difference being that Franco Manca serves sourdough pizza, while Ask served what I think a gastronome would describe as normal pizza. So why the change? Was Ask doing badly? If so, what made someone think its problems would be solved by making the dough more sour?

  Just like when going mad, having seen one inexplicable thing I started seeing them everywhere. That’s how it was with Franco Manca. So, out of curiosity, on one of the occasions when I would otherwise have gone to Pizza Express, I went to a Franco Manca. I thought it was fine, but no better than Pizza Express.

  Is that sort of one-off curiosity visit enough to sustain such a chain? It’s almost like going to see a film because you’ve noticed so many posters for it – but, instead of posters, you’ve seen actual branches of the restaurant on every high street. So, if you’ve got time on your hands, maybe you pop in; if you don’t, you miss the release. Personally, I never got round to Prezzo or Chimichanga, and lots of them have closed now. Maybe they’ll bring out a DVD.

  Obviously, if, having popped in, you find this new chain restaurant to be really terrific, and better than the chain restaurants you’ve previously frequented, then this all makes sense. But how often does that happen? Not very often,
judging by the parlous financial state of the sector. Poor old Jamie Oliver seems to be constantly cranking out books and TV shows purely to pay the staff wages in all the deserted branches of Jamie’s Italian. And every other chain, from Carluccio’s to Byron, seems to be feverishly closing branches or renegotiating rents.

  I’m no businessman, which will become obvious when I say that, to me, all this feels like a huge waste of time and energy: this desperation to take any half-decent food service concept and then strain every financial sinew to immediately open versions of it in every town, city and shopping centre, only for the resultant frail, overstretched company to collapse in the face of the lightest breeze of consumer parsimony. What’s the point? Patisserie Valerie was a small good thing, and now it’s bloated and broken, a dispiriting echo of the effect of too much cake.

  In February 2019, a private equity fund bought Patisserie Valerie out of administration and 96 branches are still open. In May, Jamie Oliver’s restaurant chain collapsed.

  * * *

  We must remember that it’s not Dairy Milk’s fault. Dairy Milk is the music, not the Wagner or Michael Jackson, in all this. You can’t blame the thing for its creator. It may put you off the thing – you may find it disconcerting to hear Jackson sing “I’m bad” over and over again, now that you know he was – but it’s not the fault of the words “I’m bad”, or the tune they’re sung to. They’re not themselves bad (or good, except in the subjective sense of their being part of a song lots of people liked). So does that mean the words are lying? If so, that’s bad. So they are bad! So they’re not lying! So they’re not … Damn it!

  Unlike music, when it comes to the recipes of popular snacks, the authorship is often unknown. Perhaps that’s for the best. If something grisly came out about whoever first thought of putting cheese on toast, that would be a blow to us all. It was invented a long time ago, so they’re pretty much bound to be racist for a start. But it could be much worse than that – so it’s better not to know. People who want to spoil cheese on toast for themselves can always use Marmite.

  Authorship may be forgotten, but intellectual property seldom is. Not many popular snacks are as legally unencumbered as cheese on toast – and I bet some corporation or other has had a go at enclosing that little tract of common land. I reckon the team at Cathedral City will have had a meeting about it. Did you notice Gordon’s Gin having a pop at changing what the G in G&T stood for? Back off, guys! And careful what you wish for: Hoovers may be everywhere, but most of them are Dysons. So I actually prefer Bombay Sapphire in my Gordon’s and Tonic. Take that, Diageo plc – I’m with Bacardi Limited!

  I don’t know who invented the recipe for Dairy Milk, but I certainly know who owns it. It’s Cadbury, formerly Cadbury Schweppes, formerly Cadbury’s, which is in turn owned by Mondelēz International, formed in 2012 from the demerger of Kraft Foods Inc. into itself and Kraft Foods Group Inc. So it’s all on a lovely local scale.

  The reason I’m contemplating the ethical position of recipe owners is that Cadbury did a bad thing. Now you’re going to think it’s worse than it is. It’s not too bad. But it is bad. And odd. I’ll just say what it is.

  They published some webpages, under the heading “Cadbury Treasure Hunt”, encouraging families to visit Britain and Ireland’s historic sites and dig for treasure. Unfortunately, as Dr Aisling Tierney, an archaeologist at Bristol University, pointed out: “Any digging within a set distance of an archaeological monument is a criminal offence.” Her profession was up in arms at Cadbury suddenly inciting people to “get their hands dirty” or have “a quick check” for gold and jewels at historically significant protected locations, with offence caused by both the potential illegality and the implication that all archaeologists do is hunt for treasure.

  Cadbury has apologised and taken those webpages down, which is quite right, but what was happening in the first place? Why was Cadbury banging on about visiting historical sites? And how did it come to do so in such a thoughtless way as to accidentally encourage criminality? Why aren’t they just saying, “You may enjoy some of our range of chocolate products”?

  Well, apparently Cadbury sells something called Cadbury Dairy Milk Freddo Treasures, which is basically moulded Dairy Milk, but there are QR codes on it – you know, those little blotchy squares, like Rorschach tests for robots – which, if scanned, open the aforementioned online looting manual. So it’s a sort of prize, but the prize is something historical to read. A hugely disappointing prize, then. I imagine the stuff about digging up treasure was shoved in to marginally allay that disappointment, while still making parents feel that it’s all very educational and outdoorsy, and so perhaps they needn’t worry so much about childhood obesity.

  I’m glad it backfired, because I really hate this kind of disingenuous corporate virtue-signalling. It’s like when retailers encourage you to collect tokens, in exchange for which they’ll give money to charity or books to schools. It’s such a depressing index of public credulity. Campaigns like that obviously succeed in increasing sales or the companies’ boards of directors wouldn’t be able to justify them to shareholders. They wouldn’t do it if people didn’t fall for it.

  I’m particularly unsettled by this one because I love Dairy Milk. To me, it is the most delicious chocolate in the world. It was also the first chocolate I ever tasted, so my preference may have more to do with the early impression it made on my palate than any objective chocolate-making excellence. But, whatever the reason, I love it. I love the taste and, emotionally, I love the product’s existence. I feel proprietorial about it.

  But it’s not mine or yours, or John Cadbury’s or Willy Wonka’s. It belongs to a multibillionaire six-year-old called Mondelēz – a bloated kid, like many of its customers. And I realise that, fundamentally, I find that ownership offensive. It feels like the people at Mondelēz have actually done what they mistakenly incited last week. They’ve purloined something, a shared and much-loved cultural artefact; they’ve looted our collective childhoods in order to enrich themselves. That’s the way of the world but, like any big winner in an unfair game, they should get it quietly.

  Yet they don’t. They flaunt it. They put bits of Oreo in it, which is like the Wizard of Oz turning up in The Wind in the Willows. They try to register a trademark for that Cadbury shade of purple and are only defeated because of objections from Nestlé. But Mondelēz gets its own back when, following intense lobbying, Nestlé’s attempt to trademark the shape of a KitKat is rejected.

  These corporate giants’ assertion and exploitation of their ownership of these beloved British treats is savage. I have to keep reminding myself it’s not Dairy Milk’s fault, because its owners are doing everything they can, short of changing the recipe, to make it taste wrong.

  * * *

  Wrapped around Monday’s Daily Mirror was a big four-page “advertising feature” paid for by Philip Morris International, the big tobacco corporation. It wasn’t advertising cigarettes, because that’s illegal in Britain. Or maybe that “because” is unfair? Perhaps I should say, “It wasn’t advertising cigarettes. Unrelatedly, that’s illegal in Britain”? Is it unjust of me to suggest that Philip Morris International would even want to advertise cigarettes?

  It’s a poser. On the one hand, Philip Morris International does advertise its Marlboro cigarette brand in many countries where it’s legal to do so. On the other hand, this particular big advert was to launch a campaign called “Hold My Light”, which seems to be encouraging people to stop smoking.

  So perhaps Philip Morris International is confused about its aims? Maybe there’s conflict at the heart of the company, with some senior executives saying it should continue selling cigarettes, while others argue that it should stop? Is that what’s happening? Or do you refuse to believe that any entity comprised of human beings could become that irrational, confused and self-destructive? If so, you haven’t been following Brexit.

  But the advert is a fascinating document for a tobacco firm to have publi
shed because it completely accepts as its premise that smoking is terribly bad for you. It’s quite startling, when you think about it – like a job applicant putting some murders on his CV. The ad then suggests an approach to stopping smoking, whereby supportive friends make a pact with the smoker and offer some sort of reward if they manage to quit for a few weeks.

  “After all,” it says, “research reveals that someone who stops smoking cigarettes for four weeks is five times more likely to go smoke-free for good. You can’t put a price on a result like that.” Can’t you? Philip Morris International really is as badly governed as Britain if it hasn’t. I think it knows exactly how much revenue it loses whenever that happens. And the ad’s subtle references to e-cigarettes and “heated tobacco” (both of which Philip Morris also sells) as “better alternatives” to smoking are part of the company’s hopeful attempt to allay that mounting cost.

  Apart from those buried ads for other products, it’s all absolute drivel – real back-of-a-fag-packet stuff: “maybe you will pledge to do the washing up every day your partner is smoke-free” or “the incentive could be tickets to the footie … or treating your pal to a manicure to give them a little pick-me-up”. And, crucially, “making the Hold My Light pledge with friends” involves registering on the “Hold My Light” website, thus generating a lovely cache of data about lots of credulous addicts. I expect Ladbrokes is bidding already.

  It’s all very distasteful, but I was still surprised to hear that Cancer Research UK had called it “staggering hypocrisy”. Is “hypocrisy” really the right word? Well, hypocrisy is saying you hold a set of beliefs while behaving in a way that belies it. So I suppose, yes, it is hypocritical to say you want people to stop smoking while manufacturing millions of cigarettes. Then again, the company doesn’t deny that it manufactures millions of cigarettes, but claims that it wants to quit: “Our ambition is to stop selling cigarettes in the UK and replace them with better alternatives,” it says in the ad.