Had one phone call come in a day earlier, had his father not been so strait-laced, no one in the City would ever have heard of David Buik.
Instead, his appearances on the BBC, Sky and elsewhere have made him one of the most public faces of finance. His idiosyncratic Today’s Fayre e-mail commentaries, untrammelled by the fusty rules of spelling and grammar, have brightened morning in-boxes in every financial institution across the land.
Buik joined Cantor Index, now BGC Partners, in 1999 to raise the profile of a business that was little-known at the time outside the specialised world of bonds trading. Though modest and self-effacing, he is now a household name in the City. To mark his official retirement a week ago, BGC hired the Royal Exchange to accommodate the hundreds who came to see him off.
He was born in Montreal and retains a Canadian passport; his father had relocated to run the London office of the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company. David Buik Sr had wanted his son to be a corporate lawyer, but academic failure put paid to that. He left Harrow having failed his A levels three times.
Family connections gained him a place as a management trainee at the merchant bank Philip Hill, Higginson, Erlanger, a job for which he was entirely unqualified and unsuited. “That’s how you got a job in those days. I could have got a job anywhere I looked if I had a contact.” It was the day of the amateur; when the business was sold for £55 million, he was required to take the cheque back to its Moorgate offices. On presenting it, the 19-year-old was told the treasurer was away and asked, in all seriousness, where the money should be invested.
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We meet at the National Gallery. Buik has a range of interests, taking in the horses, opera and football, but admits that he came to art late. Daughters Katie and Amy both studied the history of art and some years ago set out to educate him, taking their father to an exhibition of Picasso and Matisse at the Tate Modern. “Every time my mind began to wander, they tugged at my elbow. They made it so exciting.”
He surveys a picture of Charles I on horseback. “That’s an Arab,” he says, with the knowledge of one who has lost more than he cares to admit owning or betting on the nags. “He was only five-foot-two — it must have been little more than a pony.”
We pass Rubens’ The Judgement of Paris — “look at the sinews on that,” he says of a peripheral figure — and on to his Rape of the Sabine Women. “A morass of unedifying, philistine behaviour. I think it’s the innocence I like.” One assumes he is referring to the unspoilt, peasant quality of the participants rather than one of the most famous outrages of the classical world.
At Philip Hill, Buik was earning £950 a year, not a huge sum even in those days. Largely on a whim, he wrote to Robin Fox, the actors’ agent and father of James and Edward. He heard nothing for six months. He was then offered a job by RP Martin, a wholesale broker, on £1,500 a year and accepted. The next day Fox rang. He was terribly sorry for the delay. Would £2,500 a year be enough?
Buik returned to the family home to break the news to his father. “Did you not come in yesterday and tell me you had a job with RP Martin?” But I haven’t signed anything, the son stammered. “You are going to do a year minimum. Otherwise, pack your bags, because you are no son of mine.”
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Buik says today: “I have absolutely no regrets. In those days you just did what you are told.” We repair to the National Portrait Gallery around the corner. He has elected to have his picture taken next to a Gainsborough, but the only suitable work is colonised by a crowd of schoolchildren. He settles on The Death of the Earl of Chatham, a sprawling epic by the American John Singleton Copley. “He [Pitt the Elder, the first Earl of Chatham] drank for England, you know. You should read the [William] Hague book, it’s a very good read.”We move on to what I wrongly identify as Wellington. “He’s got the nose wrong,” Buik points out. It is George IV; a pen portrait of Old Nosey hangs by its side.
He is entranced by the only certified portrait of Jane Austen, by her sister Cassandra. “The best book I ever read, Pride and Prejudice.” From there through the Georgians and Victorians — the NPG is splendidly laid out to allow the visitor to browse through the ages — to the actor Edward Keen, in a toga, Thomas Hope, the banker, in oriental dress, Sir John Ross, Antarctic explorer, and Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, founder of Singapore and inspiration for the hotel.
Unlike Raffles, the Far East provided Buik with his biggest setback, in Japan, where he worked for Prebon Yamane. “I loved it but I broke the golden rule, telling Japanese management how it was.” His suggestion that the loss-making operation there should be trimmed and purged of placemen was persistently ignored. One day he went too far. “I banged my fist on the table. ‘This must stop.’ I was told to pack my bags in a week.”
Back in London, in 1998, he was almost unemployable, his age, 55, telling against him in a market dominated by brash young traders. An old friend, Martin Belsham, who ran two of Michael Spencer’s nascent betting businesses, Blue Square and City Index, offered him a job in PR and marketing. “I was very snotty. He said: ‘Don’t be so pompous.’ ” Soon afterwards he was tempted across to Cantor, now BGC, largely for the money. He saw the company through the dot-com crash and the tragic events on 9/11, when the company’s New York office was devastated by the attack on the Twin Towers, the war in Iraq and the financial collapse.
His first regular television slot was on CNN ten years ago, at 5.30am. He sees his output as the antidote to the acres of dull but worthy research pumped out by brokers every day. “What people like is to be amused or angered, to have someone have a view on a subject.”
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Buik admits that he has worked until he is 67 for purely financial reasons. “Of my peers, all have made lots of money. I never crystallised my situation. I’m a very good builder of businesses but a very bad manager. I’ve lasted 12 years longer than I might have done, and I’ve had a terrific time at BGC. Most people of that age [55] who lose their job don’t get another one.”
His “retirement” is not the end. He will work at BGC for three days a month, for the PR firm Capital Communications for two more and he is helping to prepare a blog, The Colonel, for the online financial adviser Interactive Investor.
This will present the not always politically correct views of its protagonist, who sounds a little like Buik’s alter ego, with some similarities but a few differences. By now we have passed various dull Victorians to stand in front of The Reformed House of Commons, 1833, by Sir George Hayter. This celebrates the passing of the Great Reform Bill the year before; Wellington, by then an arch-conservative, is conspicuously turning his back on proceedings.
Buik’s political views are, by his description, “rabid Tory, now getting very cross over the Conservative stance on Europe”. In those days, would you be a reformer or an arch-Conservative like Wellington? “I would be a reformer, from my background. I’m not landed gentry. There’s nothing traditional about me.”
You did once suggest the death penalty for insider trading, didn’t you? He ponders. “I think I may have said ‘strung up’.”
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CV
Born: March 21, 1944 Education: Harrow School Career: 1962-67: Philip Hill, Higginson, Erlangers;
1967-69: RP Martin & Co;
1969-73: Kirkland-Whittaker; 1973-79: London Deposit Agencies; 1979-86: Godsell & Co (then Exco); 1986-88: Babcock & Brown Money Markets;
1988-94: Prebon Yamane UK; 1994-95: MW Marshall;
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1995-96: Eurobrokers;
1996-98: Yamane Prebon;
1998-99: City Index;
1999-2006: Cantor Index;
2006-11: BGC Partners
Family: Married to Penny (35 years), three children, Barney (37, from a previous marriage), Katie (33), Amy (30); homes — flat in Fulham, West London, and cottage in Normandy
Other interests: Fulham FC, cricket, National Hunt racing, opera, theatre, art, food, wine and good company; alternative career, frustrated actor
Advice to those who may be over-ambitious: “The grass is not greener on the other side”