One of the new wave of British entrepreneurs unleashed by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s Sir Martin Sorrell has built up WPP into the world’s biggest advertising company and now employs 140,000 people across the globe, so, unlike many politicians – and academics – when he talks about business it is worthwhile listening to what he has to say. However I don’t think the Obama administration (which has very little collective business experience) will be particularly enamoured with his words
With 2011 coming into focus, “for the first time in a long time you can feel bullish about the UK in the medium-term”, Sir Martin believes. “What the UK is doing is the envy of people in Washington.”
He’s talking about David Cameron and his coalition government’s attack on the massive deficit inherited from Labour which involves quite drastic public spending cuts.
“The Coalition’s economic policy has a lot going for it,” Sir Martin said. “They’ve done the tough stuff and they’re dealing with the deficit.”
Not that it will have an easy ride. The recent angry and sometimes violent demonstrations against the increase in university tuition fees are merely the forerunner of a series of protests, not only in the streets but from the left leaning BBC and a whole swathe of academics. Cameron, however, has, at present, the advantage that, in general, the ordinary voting public appear to support the need for a period of fiscal prudence. Once the cuts start to hit home, however, he needs to be able to convince the electorate that it is a shared enterprise and therefore everyone, including the political class, needs to feel the pain – so he has to lead from the front in a mode that echoes Churchill in 1940.
And he needs to have nerves of steel to face down those of his colleagues who will flinch under fire – surprisingly they might well be from his own party rather than his Liberal Democrat coalition partners.
But at least Cameron has raised his banner and set his troopers on the march. America, led at the moment by a posse of seedy, economically illiterate hacks is rudderless in a dark and threatening world. The next President would do well to pencil in an early meeting with David Cameron not so much get some tips on what worked and what didn’t – though that in itself could be useful – but to gain the reassurance from knowing that someone else has been in the trenches….
…..and, of course, to restore a certain bust of Sir Winston Churchill back to its place in the White House.
