Hello fellow bloggers. My name is Nigel Smarther-Blair or ‘Smarter than the Average Bear’ as my fellow grads at Cambridge used to call me, the reason for which, will I am sure, become clear later on. This is my first blog posting so let’s see how it goes – it’s really to keep mummy and daddy off my back. They are such awful worriers and it’s not as if they don’t see me. Daddy comes down in his jet every few weeks or so (mostly without mummy for reasons of potentially damaging divorce settlements !) and takes back the information that I’m fine, living well within my means (!!) and am ‘dating’ the most gorgeous, young Russian girl called Natasha.
So, a bit of biographical history for you all. I suppose there’s not much to say before Cambridge beckoned. I’d been an absolute shit at school but was quite good at arithmetic and maths (must have been in the genes) and good old Daddy knew a Fellow at one of the colleges and so before you could say ‘first class honours’, a sizeable donation was made and I was off to Cambridge (pictured) which, I must say was a blast from start to finish. The ‘first class’ degree evaded me however.
Parental concern about my living standards meant that they just had to buy me a modern pad on the outskirts of the city and also supplied me with a brand new Range Rover (Vogue – what else?) which was kind of them. These two accoutrements, of course, meant that I was a bit of a target for the young ladies of Girton College which was within staggering distance of my pad. They were not an unwelcome distraction to my studies I have to say and it took another ‘financial intervention’ from Daddy to ensure my undergrad results were ‘massaged’ enough so that I could take a post grad MBA. I mean, everyone needs an MBA to work in the city these days. First Class with Hons would have been preferable but boozers can’t be choosers – ha ha!
It was a wrench leaving Cambs and all the lovelies whose clothes seemed to interminably litter every room of my pad, especially my bedroom! Geraldine was a particular favourite but whilst she was a wiz at maths she wasn’t too good on dates and the taking of pills and yet another intervention from Daddy, again financial, meant that I wasn’t encumbered with a preggers girlfriend, thank God! Never heard from her since daddy handed her the envelope. I hope the little sprog she had (I heard from a mutual friend) is doing well and has some of the family’s maths genes. God – he, or she, might grow up to be a genius and a rich one at that. What with her maths ability and my family’s money-making prowess – who knows what she might have produced?
Well, after leaving Cambridge in 2001, which was just as well, as my cocaine habit was really taking off (like my head did sometimes), I was given a nice little position in Daddy’s hedge fund business. It wasn’t called a hedge fund in those days, it was more like an investment club for Daddy’s chums. Daddy had been making a fortune for Barclays for years, mostly as a result of his contacts in the city who always managed to ‘advise’ him of any little corporate surprise before it hit the City wires and not entirely surprisingly, after one particular spat with his Chairman over his ‘pathetic bonus of only £2 million’, he decided to go it alone.
He managed to get his hands on a nice little office in Mayfair (long before it became the Hedge Fund capital of London) and got his pals to chip in some dosh and before you know it, he’s returning a stunning 25% a year and is inundated with cash coming from all directions. Ok he’s been investigated by the FSA a few times but Daddy’s contacts closed ranks and assisted in getting him not only cleared, but cleared with a public apology from the head of the FSA – after all, where would Daddy’s friends be without their annual 25%?
I was provided with a wonderful period drawing room as an office, an unfortunately stunning PA called Samantha and an expense account which was so humungous it must have been bigger than some 3rd world countries GDP! Daddy gave me a smallish fund to run and I did ok – well it would have been silly to beat his 25% so I came in at a nicely conservative 19% in my first year which earned me a £1m plus bonus. My first salary. Not bad, but I wanted more. I mean my living expenses, excluding my drug habit which had resurfaced, was running at about £150k a month and I was having to resort to a bit of ‘skimming’ to make ends meet. Unfortunately, Daddy’s auditors found a ‘little discrepancy’ in the books and I was packed off to the Caribbean for a year whist things died down a bit. There was no chance of me returning to London so once the sunny sabbatical was up, the choice was New York or Monaco. Daddy had always wanted a ‘nice little tax-free operation’ and Monaco was the most likely destination but I managed to persuade him, with Mummy on my side (it was the shopping!) that I should spend a year in the 'centre of the Universe', Manhattan, New York.
