How did it happen? One minute Damon Buffini, managing partner of Permira was the “acceptable face of capitalism at its most ferocious,” as the London Standard’s Chris Blackhurst recently put it, a bright, black, good-looking, grammar-school boy, brought up by his single mum in a Leicester council flat, who took himself off the Cambridge and ended up becoming the public face of Europe’s buyout boom.
The next minute he’s having to deal with threats of a class action claim from the GMB union, while the Daily Mirror’s Kevin Maguire has declared that any comparison of Buffini and his ilk to locusts in an insult to large grasshoppers. Will Hutton has been wheeled out at the Guardian to opine on this “plutocratic shadow” over British business, to which our politicians are in thrall, while Christopher Fildes, in his Standard column, is busy reminding people that running businesses on borrowed money rather than equity capital is like feeding a horse on sawdust rather than hay.
“It might be a cost-saving but, beyond a certain point, the horse dies.”
Private equity has had its privacy disturbed and it is difficult to see how the industry will ever get it back.
Buffin knows that, which is why he has embarked on a very public mission to calm and educate — witness today’s interview in the FT. But in doing so the Permira boss is suddenly looking much less like the industry pin-up and much more like one of those copper things often seen protruding from the top of tall buildings.
Bar a handful of letters in this newspaper (see Philip Buscombe of Lyceum, for example, or Javier Echarri of the EVCA), the response from other leaders of the PE industry has been almost non-existent.
It looks like they’re leaving Buffini hanging out there to dry. Good thing Charlie McCreevy is so willing to take some of the heat.
