The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  The producer’s bosses weren’t, it turned out, very keen on compassion or revenge. But the producer was so upset by what had happened to me that he cancelled his subscription to The Independent. His act of loyalty cheered me up when not all that much else did.

  Ken Olisa sounded very cheerful when I heard him talk at an event on ‘finding your balance’. I was invited to it by someone I met at a conference, one of many people I bored with the tale of my dramatic departure, and who listened and was kind. The event was in a wood-panelled hall. There were candles. There was champagne. But there was not very much champagne. Like most journalists, I have been programmed to expect a nice glass of something chilled to be quickly followed by a second. So when I listened to three leading businessmen talk about a turning point in their life, I was a bit distracted by my empty glass.

  It was Ken Olisa who broke through. He is short. He wears a bow tie. I’m usually filled with irritation at the sight of a man in a bow tie, but after a while I didn’t notice the bow tie because Ken Olisa is very funny. He was telling us about the dilemma he faced when the company he worked for collapsed in ‘internecine fighting’, the boss he liked got cancer and died and his new boss was ‘as close to evil as I’ve found’. I’m rarely gripped by tales of corporate infighting. In fact, when the earlier speaker talked about his struggles to ‘make partner’ in a major accountancy firm I had to hide my yawns. But Ken talked about his childhood as the mixed-race son of a single mother in a two-up two-down in Nottingham with an outside loo. He told us how the head teacher of his state junior school had played his pupils Mozart and given them each a tiny taste of caviar, so they would know there was a world beyond the one they lived in, a world where the appointment of a black bus conductor made the front page of the Nottingham Evening Post. He talked about the thrill, after Saturday jobs doing night shifts at factories and painting toilets, of getting a job, and university scholarship, with IBM. He talked about his time at Cambridge, where he ‘initially didn’t know how to use the array of knives and forks, but sucked it all in’. And he talked about getting fired from the international computer company Wang.

  Ken made getting fired sound like fun. I did not think that getting fired was fun. I thought getting fired was less fun than a cervical smear, less fun than a biopsy, less fun even than foreplay with a man who has just made you a lovely stir fry, but unfortunately got bits of chilli stuck under his nails.

  ‘I couldn’t work for him,’ said Ken, when I met him in his office in Regent Street to find out more. He was talking about the ‘evil’ boss at Wang in America. ‘I decided to think about how my mother would handle this, and you don’t just say: well, that’s it, I’m going to get another job. You go with a bang and not with a whimper. So I conceived this idea of a management buy-out, on the principle that you either get fired or you get to run the business. I got a promise of the money in the City and made an offer – and he fired me.’

  Ken still sounded jaunty. I think he nearly always sounds jaunty. But he didn’t, it turns out, feel jaunty at the time. ‘It was awful,’ he said. ‘It was a very low moment. He fired me in his office. I remember seeing images of my children and the garden in England floating before me.’

  He was offered a job with another software company. ‘Same salary, same car, same everything. I sat looking at the offer, and thought: that’s great – self-esteem saved! The neighbours will never know that I was fired. I’ll just say I moved to another company. So I’m looking at this job offer and I’m looking out of the window. I’m still at Wang doing my gardening leave bollocks, so it’s a terrible time and I look at this piece of paper and my inner imp – the one that only appears at moments of great importance – said, “So, you’re going to spend the rest of your life working for great businesses that someone else has started?”

  And I think: if I’m ever going to start my own business, it has to be now.’

  Ken started a boutique technology-focused merchant bank, as you do when you’re a hotshot City type who knows about things like computers and banking, which make money, and not things like poetry and journalism, which don’t. He got a string of board roles and chairmanships. He was the first black man to serve on the board of a public UK company and has been voted the most influential black person in the country. But the strapline he chose for his current enterprise, another technology boutique merchant bank, is ‘Entrepreneurs never travel smoothly’. After talking to him, you can see why.

  From 2008 to 2011 he was a director of a mining company controlled by Kazakh oligarchs. I was tempted to swap stories of oligarchs and tell him that I’d had a nice chat about Russian poetry with the one that owned The Independent, in the days when I was part of the editor’s inner court. But my own falling out with an oligarch, or at least an oligarch’s puppet, wasn’t plastered all over the Sunday Times. ‘It’s a really tragic story,’ said Ken. The short version of it is that ENRC, a Kazakh-based multinational focused on mining and metals, wanted to be listed on the Stock Exchange, which meant it had to conform to British governance. Ken and some of the other non-execs helped launch ‘a really big due diligence exercise’, but somebody produced a dossier accusing them of ‘all kinds of dodgy things’ and sent it to every British newspaper. ‘The Sunday Times published a full-page article on us and how evil we were,’ said Ken. ‘It was a terrible story.’

  Ken managed to persuade the board to undergo an independent governance review. The reviewer concluded that it was the worst board it had ever seen. On the week of the AGM, the Kazakh government, which owned 11 per cent of the company, said it would support the directors. On the Tuesday, it changed its mind and the oligarchs followed their lead. Later that day, Ken became the first non-executive director of a FTSE 100 company to be publicly fired at its AGM. Ken published his farewell letter, saying that the whole situation was ‘more Soviet than City’.

  Even when being publicly ousted, Ken kept his sense of humour. But it was, he said, ‘a horrible experience’ and for a while he felt his reputation was in shreds. In an interview a few weeks after it all happened, he said that ‘technically’ everything the shareholders did was ‘completely correct, like all great show trials in Moscow in the Communist regime’. Everything, he said, ‘is done according to the book, it’s just that the book wasn’t fair. Kafka, eat your heart out.’

  It’s surprising how often Kafka comes up in stories of redundancy. You don’t have to be a big fan of German literature to recognize the feeling he describes of a man arrested and put on trial, but never told what crime he is meant to have committed. You don’t have to have read his novel The Castle to have that sense of reporting to officials whose jobs and actions are never explained. You don’t have to have read Metamorphosis to know what it’s like to wake up feeling like a creature that no longer recognizes its world.

  Most people I know do not found boutique merchant banks. Most people I know work in the arts or journalism, because these are the fields I have worked in. They are not professions that make management buy-outs a good option for going out with a bang. They are not, in fact, even professions. Most of us feel proud if we’ve raised the cash to buy a sofa. Most of us get redundancy deals that would make a business person laugh. But our managers seem to be as keen on Kafka, or on re-enacting Kafka, as everyone else.

  It’s quite a few years since I worked with Claire. She is kind and funny and conscientious and has always been very good at whatever job she has done. Claire is not her real name. Because of the gagging clause in her poxy redundancy deal, I can’t give her real name. But when Claire told me about what had happened with her employer I felt like calling a big strong friend of mine who was once banged up for GBH.

  ‘There was,’ she told me, in the café where we nearly always meet, ‘talk of a restructure. The seed of anxiety was sown four years ago and it continued to build and build. So there was this anticipation that we might all have to apply for our jobs or lose them.’ Ah yes, that HR favourite, ‘restructure’, which nearly always
seems to lead to all kinds of other pseudo-scientific words. ‘There was a sense,’ she said, ‘that what had been before was wrong, and then there was talk of being “fit for purpose”. From very early on, there was a sense of those people who were safe and those people who were unsafe, and those people in the unsafe camp were set up to fail.’

  After the talk of being ‘fit for purpose’, there were appraisals. But not the kind of appraisals that were meant to make you better at your job. ‘Basically, within those appraisals,’ said Claire, after taking a bite of the mini biscuit they give you free with your cup of coffee, ‘twelve months before the redundancy, a narrative was being created. You could be told, for example, that you were over-conscientious, that you panicked. Or somebody who questioned was seen as resistant. It was clear,’ she said, and the hurt was still written on her face, ‘that the narrative from those appraisals was something that would be used to get rid of you.’

  After four years of being ground down in this way, Claire decided not to apply for her own job, because she thought the odds of getting it were slim. Other people did, and should have saved their time and breath. ‘I felt really, really sad,’ she said, ‘because for the first time ever in my working life, I felt people couldn’t wait to see the back of me. I was ready to believe that I was a bit outdated. After such a positive work history in marketing, I couldn’t believe that my job would end that way. Because I tend to see the best in people it was really hard for me to grasp that people would behave like that. It was such a nasty way of working, really scheming and really spiteful. It was,’ she said, and now her eyes were sad, ‘just so alien to anything I’d ever experienced.’

  I really wish I could name and shame her former employers. I know, of course, exactly how she felt. Like Claire, I was a bit naïve. My parents brought me up to believe that hard work would be rewarded. They talked about things like honour and truth. At the first ‘consultation’, with the managing editor and the young woman from HR, I said I wasn’t confident that the process would be fair, because the person who had taken over my boss’s job had been heard telling people that I was only given a column ‘because I was a woman’. The woman from HR assured me that it would be fair, but when I showed a summary of the ‘consultation’ to a lawyer, that was certainly not how it looked.

  You have to be brave or rich to take on an oligarch’s lawyers. I am not rich and I am not as brave as that. My union took over the negotiations. There wasn’t all that much to negotiate, since our redundancy deal had been cut in half when the oligarch bought the paper, and there was no hope of getting the standard deal back. But at least it meant I didn’t have to talk to the management any more. When the managing editor rang, and tried to talk me through the twists and turns of a process that made Kafka look like a model of what businesses like to call ‘best practice’, his voice made my stomach lurch.

  After that last meeting in the editor’s office, it took days for the shaking to stop. Even when it did, I couldn’t sleep. I have always had trouble waking up in the morning, but almost as soon as I’d fall asleep I would be jolted awake by something that felt like an electric shock. It wasn’t just that I’d lost my job and my livelihood. I had also lost my faith in what my father always used to call fair play.

  When Gordon Brown lost his job as prime minister, he said he would do one big interview. He chose The Independent, and the editor (not the editor who fired me, but the one who was fired before him) picked me to do it. I nearly missed the train from King’s Cross. I didn’t like thinking about what the editor would say if I told him I’d missed the interview because I’d missed the train. When I left London it was a hot summer’s day. As the train passed through the wild east coast of Scotland, the sky got darker and the temperature dropped. By the time I arrived at Kirkcaldy, where Brown had been MP for the last twenty-seven years, the whole world seemed to be made of rain.

  I spent the best part of a day with Gordon Brown. He was probably the most interesting person I have ever interviewed. He is complicated. He is fascinating. He is, in his own way, brave. In the car on the way to the football ground of his local football team, Raith Rovers, he told me about his friendship with Nelson Mandela. He told me about the time the British High Commissioner in South Africa opened a parcel in front of an invited audience, thinking it was a medal for Mandela’s wife, Graça Machel. When he ripped open the brown paper, purple sequins fell out. It was, in fact, a birthday card made for her by Brown’s four-year-old son.

  It took me a while to pluck up the courage to ask if he missed being at Downing Street. There was a long pause. ‘No,’ he said. I wasn’t sure that I believed him, but I did admire his stiff upper lip.

  When the interview came out, it was mentioned on the ten o’clock news. Someone wrote to the paper saying ‘this is what journalism is for’. I didn’t know if it was what journalism was for, but I did feel that it was what I was for. I didn’t know what I was for any more.

  Anger is an energy

  Usually, when you leave a newspaper, people go to quite a lot of trouble to organize a ‘front page’. This is a mock-up of the front page of your newspaper, with witty headlines and a photo of you as the star. Somebody buys some bottles. Somebody gives a speech. People tell you how great you were at the job and how sorry they will be to see you go. This is not what happens when you have shouted at the editor and he has threatened to get security to march you out.

  A reader emailed to tell me that my name had been removed from The Independent’s website. Another told me that a colleague’s nomination for the Orwell Prize had been mentioned, but not mine. It was the first time I had ever been shortlisted for a major prize. I was the only woman on the shortlist. I found out about it on Twitter.

  I had to call the organizers of the prize and tell them to change my biographical note. We decided to say that I was ‘now freelance’. It’s an interesting word, ‘freelance’. In the right mood, it can make you think of galloping over prairies on wild horses, clutching a mane as you gaze at a brilliant sunset in a giant sky. It can make you feel unfettered, unshackled, under no obligation to anyone, anywhere. In the wrong mood, it can make you think of boils.

  The word was, apparently, first used by Walter Scott in his novel Ivanhoe. I have a complete set of Scott’s Waverley novels. They are dark red leather and still smell musty and were my father’s and his father’s before that. I have to admit that I’ve never read any of them, but in Ivanhoe, at least according to the article I read, Scott used the word ‘freelance’ of men who offered their skill with a lance to wealthy landowners. They were, in other words, people who killed for cash.

  I didn’t get the chance to kill anyone, but I did get invited to a party. It was the Arts Council, not The Independent, that invited me to the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. I had been going to the prize-giving for years before I even worked at The Independent and saw no reason not to go now. Usually, the guests are from the literary world. The editor is better known for his reporting on FTSE 100 companies than on Eastern European literature in translation and it never occurred to me that he would be there. So when I walked into the room, and saw him on the other side of it, I felt my heart jump. He was talking to the managing editor. They both looked as if they had found themselves stranded on an island where the natives spoke a different language and would eat them if they spotted that they couldn’t join in.

  It was as much of a surprise to me as to them when I marched over and asked them how they were. They both mumbled that they were fine, and I said that I was very pleased to hear it. They didn’t ask me how I was and I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell them about the shaking and the nightmares and how the shadow deputy prime minister had asked me what the paper was doing to its female staff. There was an awkward silence and then a loud noise from the stage and then the speeches started.

  All through the speeches, I stood by their side. I loomed above them in my heels. When they tried to inch away from me, I inched my way towards them. It made me feel like on
e of the daemons in Philip Pullman’s books, a creature that looks like a human and follows its master wherever he goes.

  The literary editor gave his speech. He thanked The Independent for supporting the prize. I started coughing. It was a very loud cough indeed. When somebody else thanked The Independent, I started coughing again. I have always been a good girl. At school, I thought it would be the end of the world if a teacher ever told me off. Now no one could tell me off. I was freelance. I was free.

  When the speeches finished, I saw a writer I knew. ‘Lisa,’ I said, ‘meet the editor of The Independent.’ I turned to the editor and his face looked like a cartoon. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I have never seen anyone walk so fast out of a room. He bolted. The editor who had behaved like an emperor actually bolted. A few minutes later, the managing editor did too. I told him that I thought it would be nice to tweet a photograph of him as a final memento of my time at the paper and he literally ran down the stairs and locked himself in the loo. I asked if he would like me to call security and then went back upstairs and told my former colleagues that the managing editor was hiding in the Gents’.

  It was probably the most childish thing I have ever done. But it was very, very good fun. I agree with the Sex Pistols. Or to be more accurate, because journalists are meant to try to be accurate, I agree with John Lydon, who used to be Johnny Rotten, and the band he formed when the Sex Pistols crashed. Anger is an energy, he said in ‘Rise’, a song he wrote for his band Public Image Ltd. He said it more than twenty times. Anger is an energy. And if you’re going to rise again, you’re going to need all the energy you can get.