To the Chelsea Flower Show this week, which was its usual mix of power brokers, bankers and top business executives rubbing shoulders with the general garden-loving public, writes Deirdre Hipwell, retail and M&A editor at the Times.
Despite a heavy security presence after the terrible events in Manchester on Monday night, the City still turned out in force to this prestigious corporate networking event in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea.
While snaffling a ticket to the exclusive gala night on Monday evening before the main show kicks off is the most assured way to mingle which the absolute who’s who of British business, the show’s exclusive hospitality area – Jardin Blanc – also thronged with the City’s movers and shakers all week.
When I went for dinner on Tuesday night as a guest of Dobbies garden centre (which was, of course, all disclosed and approved beforehand – the Bribery Act is real folks!) within seconds of arriving I had spotted Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, Antonio Horta-Osorio, the boss of Lloyds, which recently got shot of its taxpayer-backed government shareholder, Dominic Grace, a residential director at Savills, and Rob Tincknell, the man behind the Battersea Power Station development.
Tincknell must be feeling very pleased that his scheme (and the Northern Line extension) was credited this week with making Battersea a little housing hotspot immune from the wider current slowdown in the capital’s housing market… supposedly. That is the word according to eMoov, which may be a “disruptive” online agent but has clearly quickly developed the same skillset for talking up the market as its bricks and mortar-based rivals.
Overall, the mood around business seemed surprisingly upbeat given the wider macro environment, where the pound is still languishing in value and real wages are starting to fall, impacting consumer sentiment. There was a little talk around the election but only in the sense that everyone expects the Tories to win, the only question being by what margin. The biggest talking point was, not surprisingly, Brexit and as has been the case for some time, the main area of concern seems to be access to EU labour. In a country where thousands of jobs, both skilled and unskilled, are met by workers from the continent there is real fear about disruption if Theresa May cannot negotiate a sensible solution for EU workers. This will have to a top priority in our negotiations.
There were fears this year that that the Chelsea Flower Show might be impacted by the Financial Conduct Authority crackdown on hospitality that might be interpreted as improper. There was much commentary around the fact that the number of sponsored gardens dropped to eight this year from 17 last year and 21 in 2008, with Harrods, Telegraph Group and Cloudy Bay, the wine brand owned by LMVH, among some of the sponsored gardens to drop out. This is also going to be the last year that M&G, the investment arm of Prudential Insurance Group, will be sponsoring the event after eight years, in part because it has become concerned about the rules on inducements and how it might appear to invite financial advisers to the show.
However, from where I was standing in the Jardin Blanc, inhaling canapés and washing them down with lashings of wine, it seems to me as if Chelsea Flower Show is still the hottest corporate ticket in town.
