In fact the very name of Alam, the former personal assistant at the Football Association who became embroiled in a scandal over affairs with her superiors, sends a shiver through Judith Kark, principal of the institution that has turned out generations of young women armed with perfect shorthand, flawless manners and the ability to make a very proper cup of tea.
“We teach our girls the traditional skills and how to behave,” said Kark primly. “We tell them that a reduction in formality does not mean a reduction in standards. Even if the boss wears shorts to the office and says ‘Call me John’, it does not mean that the rules of business etiquette no longer apply.”
In other words it is not a cue to jump into bed with him. But to judge by Alam’s case, the world of Lucie Clayton is now rather removed from the reality of British office life.
Alam, 39, is the PA who had flings with Mark Palios, her chief executive, and Sven-Goran Eriksson, the England coach. She is now claiming at an employment tribunal that she was forced to resign from her £35,000-a-year job after the affairs became public, that she was bullied by FA officials and was sexually harassed by a third executive (which he denies).
To some she is a victim, seduced by lascivious bosses all too aware of their power. But to others she is a traitor to the hard-fought cause of sexual and secretarial equality, a gold digger out for personal gain.
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Whatever your view on Alam’s behaviour, she illustrates the changing nature of the modern secretary.
More than ever personal assistants, as they are increasingly known, must have excellent time management skills as they juggle work, ambition and the opportunities presented by dodgy invitations to dinner from their bosses.
For as secretaries are becoming more skilled, some are using their position and relationships as stepping stones to greater things. At the same time, Britain’s long working hours have made bosses more vulnerable than before.
Quite who is attempting to take advantage of whom is no longer clear — even if, when it all goes wrong, it is still the secretary who is most likely to pay the price.
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WHEN Becky, now a 33-year-old manager with a public relations company in Manchester, began work, she started as a secretary. She was ambitious — and hit it off with her boss, a married man 15 years older than her.
“Looking back it wasn’t that I targeted him or anything,” she said. “It was more that we were quite similar, the same sort of education and aspirations. And we were working long hours together.”
Although the affair fizzled out after a while, she believes it probably helped her career. She was given more responsibility, which gave her the experience to talk her way into an executive role at another company. “Being a secretary and why people do it are just very different these days — if you want it to be,” she said.
Recent research by Parker Bridge, the recruitment consultancy, found that two-thirds of secretaries now have responsibilities usually associated with other managerial functions. More than half see their jobs mainly as a route to higher things. And a survey by Joslin Rowe, another recruitment consultancy, found that one-third of secretaries are educated to degree level.
Such advances, along with the shift to more informality and equality, have inevitably altered the way that secretaries interact with bosses.
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“I started with a shorthand pad and a pen in my hand, now I run the office,” said a PA to the chief executive of a well known international company. “The girls in the office were called by first names and the bosses were always ‘Mr so-and-so’. Now I talk to directors at other companies on first name terms and my bosses make their own tea and coffee.
“The trouble is, some young secretaries now dress more as if they are going to the beach. It gives men the wrong message, however politically incorrect it is to say so.”
Alam was ambitious from an early age. In the late 1990s she auditioned at the Asian Fame Academy to become a catwalk model. Anjana Raheja, a PR who met her at the time, said: “She had personality and charm. She just oozed confidence.”
Although Alam might have taken to the fashion world, it did not take to her and she left to do a secretarial course, going on to land a job at the FA. There she attracted the attention first of Palios, whom she codenamed Pretty Polly, and later Eriksson, the ice-cool Swede whom she nicknamed Sugar and described as having “a fantastic body”.
E-mails revealed her desire to make the most of her situation. “I’m 36, unmarried and loving it. My social life is amazing and I date famous people,” she wrote. “I knew my potential lay in dealing with high-flyers and big shots.” She then went into a graphic description of sex acts with Palios.
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Most tellingly of all she e-mailed one female friend: “Sugar is brilliant. I want to be happy and very, very rich and successful and I will be.
“I’m not going to go through life settling for second best, ever.”
Not that it was all a one-way affair. Alam also wrote of Eriksson: “He’s been pursuing me since September last year.”
Alas, all did not go well. Eriksson is still with his long-term girlfriend Nancy Dell’Olio, an Italian lawyer; Alam left her job — and promptly sold her story to two newspapers for £300,000; and Palios was forced to resign.
Who has behaved badly? Was it wrong for Alam to dream of the high life through her relationships with her FA superiors? Gary Long, a male “executive assistant” at Reed Personnel Services, said: “When an executive has an affair with their secretary, they are both taking advantage — they both have an agenda.
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“I think Alam is a gold digger. Sleeping with the boss to get ahead is just unethical. It’s never acceptable because it should be your work that takes you forward. If many of us are working very hard, it’s unfair.”
Alam’s defenders, however, point out that Eriksson apparently told her that he and Dell’Olio were leading separate lives, and Palios was estranged from his wife.
Katharine Nice, a 23-year-old secretary at a car dealership in Essex, said: “It’s the men who are in the wrong. They took advantage of those below them. They shouldn’t have done it.
“I think Alam was probably quite a clever lady. If it’s getting her ahead, then why not? If the men are stupid enough to fall for it, that’s their fault.”
Even the secretary to the chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, who asked not to be identified, sympathised.
“You live on the margins of this incredibly seductive world where your nose is constantly being rubbed into unbelievable wealth,” she said.
“I book the most fantastic hotels for my boss, I send fabulous flowers to his girlfriend and then I have to go back to my one-bedroom flat in Fulham.
“If your boss flirts with you, you begin to think that you could travel on the Learjet, too. Faria was at worst naive and she’s the one who’s suffered. I feel sorry for her.”
Right or wrong, such affairs are almost inevitable these days, according to Professor Cary Cooper, an organisational psychologist at Lancaster University Management School.
“A lot of senior people in all walks of life spend more time at work than at home. They may be alienated from family and spouses, and the PA — who is still usually female — knows everything about their lives,” he said.
“There’s a siege mentality and a mutual dependence.”
He reckons that as many as one in four senior executives working long hours — which he defines as 60 hours a week or more — will have an affair of this sort.
The problem is that computer technology and changing roles have propelled bosses and secretaries into a state of mutually assured destruction. They know so much about each other’s lives that the fallout is nuclear when it all goes awry.
WHEN Jennifer Ferguson was the secretary to a top executive at a finance company in Scotland, she fell out with him and was asked to leave. She applied for another job only to find that her former boss had supplied a poor reference. So Ferguson promptly told the police about the 20,000 pornographic images, some of young girls, that she had found on her former boss’s computer when she had to check his e-mails while he was on holiday. Last year he ended up in court and was put on probation for three years.
Computers were also the undoing of Richard Phillips, a highly paid lawyer at Baker & McKenzie, and Jenny Amner, a secretary. His demand that she should pay a £4 dry cleaning bill after she spilt tomato ketchup on his trousers might have gone nowhere if she had not taken revenge by spreading it like wildfire through the office e-mail system. Last week saw the resignation of Phillips, who has been globally branded as a mega-meanie. He claimed that he had been “considering a change of career for some time”. But Amner is little better off. She is on paid leave, apparently shunned by colleagues who feel that Phillips was treated unfairly.
Such is the level of interdependence that temptations and dangers abound. According to a study by OfficeTeam, a recruitment specialist, 36% of secretaries know their boss’s bank details; 52% believe they know more about their boss’s movements than their spouses; and 62% say their boss confides in them about personal matters.
Joyti De-Laurey, PA to two managing directors at Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, was so involved in organising her bosses’ personal lives that she was able to raid their bank accounts to fund a lavish lifestyle. The executives, though, received scant public sympathy, largely because De-Laurey was able to make off with £4.5m before they even noticed anything was amiss.
How can bosses and secretaries steer clear of the danger zone? The advice from Cooper is simple: “Keep professional.” But that is easier said than done — as Leslie Kark, who developed the Lucie Clayton school, knew. He got on all too well with Evelyn Gordine, his secretary, and installed her as head of the school.
“She married her boss in 1956,” said Judith Kark, Leslie’s daughter-in-law. “He was already separated, of course, but they had had an affair for a few years.” Nevertheless, Kark is in no doubt about how the proper secretary should behave: “These relationships can bring great rewards and it is hard for girls not to dream. The trouble is, they lead to many more red faces and difficulties than they do rings on fingers.”
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