Life under the Sergeant
by Neil Collins
I once described Patrick Sergeant as the man who invented financial journalism as entertainment. Before he started his column as City Editor of the Daily Mail, financial reporting had been dry, specialist stuff. He noticed that a majority of the Mail readers were female, and they would respond to a column which had personality, mixed with a little gossip, while telling them what was going on in the City. It was a formula that served him well for 24 years. He died on 18 September aged 100.
I was fortunate enough to work for him for five of those years, the last two as his deputy, writing a second-rate pastiche while he was schmoozing the world’s central bankers and finance ministers in exotic locations. The formula he invented for Euromoney, essentially their house magazine, made a fortune for him and the Mail’s owners. In return for their taking advertisements promoting their country (and them) he would commissionha friendly editorial copy to keep the ads apart.
Most of the time though, he was at his desk (minus long lunches with senior bankers or politicians at the best London restaurants) having subcontracted the column to one of us hapless hacks. We would sweat at it all day (minus a longish lunch at some City hostelry) before presenting our opus to the master.
He would make (mostly) appreciative noises, and then reach for a plain paper pad, on which he would start writing with a felt-tip pen. Before your very eyes, your worthy prose would be transformed into something like poetry. Of course he knew more about the story you had tried to write than he had earlier let on, so it was rather more than just stardust he was sprinkling.
After each paragraph he would call in his long-suffering, chain-smoking secretary, Yvonne, who would type out his scrawl, double-spaced, whereupon he would have another go at the text with his felt-tip. The process would repeat until he was happy with the result. His only real competition was Kenneth Fleet, the City Editor of the Daily Telegraph, and on the rare days of a Fleet beat, we were promised a sticky morning.
When I became City Editor of the Telegraph in 1986, I understood how much I owed Patrick in my attempts to learn from the master. To say he taught me all I knew would be an exaggeration, but not much of one. The City is much more important today, but financial journalism is somehow back in its ghetto, with much economic comment taken over by political writers talking about “headroom for tax giveaways” and similar nonsense. Patrick would definitely not approve.