Montague - A Year on the Sauce

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The recession will hit millions of hard working families really hard, and it scares me. Because, and in spite, of this we have to take any pleasures where we can find them.

Be it the revelation about Madoff (pronounced made-off) defrauding the stupendously wealthy and stupid of a generous helping of their ill-gotten gains, or the fact the man at the helm of the most significant company collapse in almost a century was called Dick Fuld (pronounced fold).

The names in this current tragicomedy suggest to me the dead hand of a playwright, as though we are stuck in a sequel to Tom Stoppards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

So, a little snippet of news tucked away in the back of the Guardian made me laugh until I cried: The embattled media empire run by former Mirror Group boss David Montgomery secured a two-month stay of execution yesterday as it tries to renegotiate its debts amid rising concern about its future.

Mecom, which has debts of almost 600m, compared with a stock market value of 13.5m, said it was in talks with its banks about amending its overdraft so as to provide financial stability in the medium term.

Its lenders have agreed not to check whether it is in breach of the covenants attached to its loans on 31 December, as originally planned, but on 28 February instead. Mecom in return is to pay a one-off fee of 2.5m (2.35m) to its banks and increase its interest payments by the equivalent of a 1.75-point rise in the interest rate, which is likely to cost it millions more unless a deal can be done quickly.

Reporters older than me will know of David Montgomery. He was the man who modernised The Mirror. He swept the features desk clear of all those public school revolutionaries, destroying the NUJ before it destroyed the newspaper.

He kept the boat afloat when Maxwell was bobbing around in the sea. The old ideologues in the Mirror chapel squawked about standards. But they were only interested in their fellow members and were afraid of progress, afraid of history and the brave new world of lower costs and higher profits. And the printers, dont get me started on the printers.

Todays Mirror is a testament to the Montgomery vision. The share price of Trinity Mirror has tanked from 6.25 in January 2006 to a low of 29.25p: a headache-inducing 84 percent wiped off the market value in the last 12 months. The market capitalisation has now fallen from 1.3billion to 132m.

The readership once hit four million (higher if you believe the tales about the executives lying to keep sales figures down because of a bonus promised to staff once it broke through that landmark). Now its 1.4 million and falling. Apparently, the plan was to asset strip the company and dump it on some gilded fool of a venture capitalist.

Richard Stott, the editor of the Daily Mirror from 1985 to 89 and 1991 to 92, wrote in the Independent back in March 2005: During Montgomerys tenure of more than six years he destroyed the infrastructure of the Mirror.