Michael Brett would not have been out of place in a Damon Runyon short story, or at least a London-based version of Runyon’s New York. Small, somehow schoolboy-ish, chain smoking, never exactly sartorial and with the world’s most overcrowded desk, Michael was very much the old-school journalist. As such, he liked a scoop and the excesses of the UK’s secondary banking crisis of the early 1970s were right up his street. The crisis was based on irresponsible lending to the chancers who populate every property boom and no journalist understood property better than Michael. Maybe it helped that he was the son of a chartered surveyor, but analysing property also means combing through the boring stuff of liens and encumbrances and Michael excelled at such forensic work.
For Investors’ Chronicle, this brought commercial success as well as the editorial kind and the advertising revenue that accompanied the magazine’s property coverage helped Michael on his path to becoming the editor in 1977. This was a difficult time for the magazine. In the UK the future of capitalism looked in doubt and the demise of private investors was almost a given. So the IC needed a new identity, but it was hampered by its joint ownership between the Financial Times and IPC, a printing conglomerate best known as owner of the Daily Mirror. Michael played a key role in transferring ownership wholly to the FT. He also gave the magazine a more business-orientated identity. The effect was to preserve the brand until the sustained bull markets of the late 1980s and Thatcherism meant the IC could once more champion private investors.
After leaving the IC, Michael wrote that rare book, a best seller on financial analysis, How to Read the Financial Pages (Random House). That it has run to five editions and is still available 34 years after it was first published says it all.
