The Mayfair Set

Anyone who thought they understood finance in 1970 would soon be badly wrong-footed, unless their name was Goldsmith, Slater or Rowland. The whole relationship between governments, stock-markets, banks and shareholders simply went into ragtime, and it hasn't stopped yet.

This 4-part study attempts to rationalise it for the humble layman, but it doesn't really chime as a satisfying quartet. Part 1 seems somewhat off-topic, mostly to do with a demobbed colonel lamenting the end of empire. Part 2 ('Entrepreneur Spelt S.P.I.V.') is the one that actually gets to the guts of the problem - Jim Slater and the asset-stripping revolution, soon copied by 'Tiny' Rowland in Africa. Part 3 is concerned with Reaganomics and junk-bonds, which all gets a bit technical for me. And Part 4 is a gloomy tale of the old tycoons when they've outlived their glory days.

The subject is really too broad for a short series like this. For example, the umbrella-title 'The Mayfair Set' refers to the Clermont Club in its splendid Palladian town-house in Berkeley Square, and the venue alone would have justified a 1-hour documentary. In this context, for example, we get one glimpse of Lord ('Lucky') Lucan, with no mention of the sensational murder case in which both he and the club were so intimately involved.

Quite fun to listen to various tycoons complaining about corrupt habits that they themselves had largely introduced into the system. Perhaps a little sad to hear about Goldsmith succumbing to apocalyptic visions, which clearly reflected his own approaching demise. And there is an ironic ending, with Jim Slater recalling boyhood games of Monopoly, where he selected the best properties to buy, according to how far they were from the 'Go to Jail' square!

At the end of this film I was of bemusement at the unreported and almost unseen approach that capital and capital markets have taken since 1945 to gradually take control of the political systems of the USA and the United Kingdom. Curtis outlines several key points and analyses at great length various events and personalities.

These so called market movers were all members of the Clermont Club in Mayfair, London. What at first seemed to be an audacious and unrealistic strategy to take control of the market economy turned into something almost unstoppable, destructive, cruel and completely bereft of feeling or scruple.

What is so shocking is that the corruption and immorality did not start as commonly assumed in the 1980's with the ascent of Reagan and Thatcher to power but with the beginning of the global economy in the late 1950s. There is much material shown here that should be much more discussed and explained because it depicts aptly how moribund and fragile the economies of the developed world have become. How they are built up on tenuous and shallow assumptions that market cycles are no longer applicable. The greed and deception of the business elite reaches far further and far wider than beyond anyone's common knowledge or understanding of politics.

Watch this. Be informed. Be scared.