The networker

For the past 17 years Roland Rudd has been making a handsome living advising CEOs on whether to grant interviews like this one. He weighs up the potential risk of his clients looking silly against the potential reward of having their egos tickled and their businesses promoted. As often as not, the answer comes back negative.

So when I asked if he would like to be interviewed himself, I was not expecting him to say yes. You don’t need to be a PR person to know that it’s not good when the PR man becomes the story, as Andy Coulson has discovered.

Yet he replies to my e-mail saying, “I couldn’t possibly say no given how flattered I am to have been asked.”

So I turn up to his offices by Moorgate station in London and wait in a room that has been set for lunch. After a while, Rudd opens the door and plants a light kiss on each of my cheeks.

“Lucy! Hello! So sorry to have kept you,” he says.

It has been a while. In the early 1990s Rudd was a colleague on the FT, part of a double act with his great friend, Robert Peston, now the BBC’s business editor. The Pest and the Rat we called them back then; both tall, dark and ambitious, though the Pest was considered the better journalist, while the Rat (named after the TV character Roland Rat) was the handsome charmer.

When, in 1994, the Rat announced that he was leaving to set up in PR it was no surprise: Rudd seemed to be a PR man already, though few predicted back then quite how well he would do. He is in the top three most influential PR people in the country, as decreed by PR Week. His company, Finsbury (bought by Martin Sorrell’s WPP in 2001 in a deal that landed Rudd an estimated £40m), has more than a quarter of the FTSE100 companies as its clients.

And now he is going global. Last month Finsbury merged with Robinson Lerer & Montgomery, a US PR firm also owned by WPP, with Rudd as the executive chairman.

Roland Rudd looks just the same as he did all those years ago, still very much the matinee idol in spite of a slight greying around the temples, still thin as a pencil under his elegant suit.

“If I didn’t work hard at it, I would be terrifically fat. I’m sure you don’t have to try,” he says, the easy flattery flowing from him as smoothly as ever.

What has changed about him is that he has acquired that sheen of success, hard to define, but easy enough to explain where it came from. What Rudd did was to spot the way that financial PR was moving, away from the back-room activity in which fixers planted dodgy stories. Instead, he (and his rival Alan Parker at Brunswick) have refashioned their trade so that they are life coaches and trusted friends to their CEO clients. To do this, the network is everything – and few do it as well as Rudd.

A few weeks ago he threw a 50th birthday party, picking the same day that the chancellor of the exchequer chose to celebrate one decade fewer. But the Rudd do, held at his Georgian house in Somerset, made George Osborne’s Dorneywood party look a cheapskate affair. Rudd’s guests – including his friend Peter Mandelson, Viscount Rothermere, and a thick soup of top bankers, journalists, politicians, businessmen and people in the arts – ate and drank lavishly in a splendid greenhouse edifice, built specially for the party, with a wall that slid away after dinner to reveal a dance floor on which a band was playing and a Pan’s People-style troupe were gyrating.

Roland Rudd with Peter Mandelson at a wedding in east London, 2009

I ask about the guest list and he says lightly: “I don’t have a demarcation between private and business: it just merges into one,” fixing me with his dark brown eyes.

James Murdoch was there too, his last big party before his world disappeared under a heap of phone-hacking allegations. Rudd, who acts for BSkyB, didn’t advise the Murdochs on the scandal but starts to tell me how it could have been done better.

“When you’ve got a major crisis of any kind, the most important thing is to recognise the enormity of it. It’s sometimes better to exaggerate it to yourself. Never try and suppress it. Never try and blame anybody else. Never try and pretend that you’re the victim.”

The reason people as smart as the Murdochs got it wrong at the start, he says, is that it’s easier to be wise about other people’s problems than about your own. Hence the need for a great PR adviser at all times.

I ask Rudd if he needs a PR himself. He tells me that actually he has just ignored the advice of his deputy, who warned against this interview.

“We are always talking about the importance of being open,” he explains, “so it would be slightly hypocritical of me to say no.”

Yet he doesn’t believe in openness for all his clients. Many of them he steers away from the press, while others are put through endless rehearsals on how to answer tough questions without losing their cool.

So which questions make Roland Rudd angry? He lets out a loud roar of laughter, which serves more as a pause for thought than a genuine expression of mirth.

“I have my faults, but I never lose my temper.”

I remind him of the time when the FT published a story about Cadbury, a client of Rudd’s, which Rudd took exception to.

“Ah yes,” he says, smiling at the memory. “I think Lionel [Barber, FT editor] was quite irritated with me because I was talking to him as I was going into the opera – Don Carlos, which Finsbury was sponsoring – and I had about 40 clients for dinner.

“But Lionel and I had a very good, robust discussion. I went out in the interval to talk to him again, and I remember the usher saying, ‘if you go out, you can’t come back.’”

Only in the end Rudd persuaded the usher to let him back – which sounds like the Rudd I knew. He was always scrupulously, almost excessively, polite to the man in reception or the woman in the canteen.

“I’m interested in people,” he tells me. “I don’t have a way of acting with some people that I don’t with other people.”

The ushers, of course, don’t get invited to the parties. But then neither were all of his clients so favoured. When I ask if any were left off the guest list he gives another of his noisy laughs.

“I can’t remember,” he says.

I say this is a feeble answer and he laughs again.

“I totally agree. How I thought I could get away with it with you, I really don’t know.”

Then he says in a confidential tone, as if a great secret were coming: “I’ll tell you a funny thing. I always remember with my 40th, I never invited Michael Green, and he was so annoyed.”

Neither did he ask the youthful PR man who then worked for Green, David Cameron, which with hindsight was even more of a mistake, especially as Rudd’s enormous contact list is heavier on Liberals and New Labour (he famously was one of the “wise men” who advised Tony Blair) than on Tories.

Green’s wasn’t the only nose put out of joint at the 40th. Rudd, who had just agreed to sell to WPP, gave a triumphant speech hinting at the size of the spoils. News got back to Sorrell, who was most displeased. “At the beginning it was a bit of a scratchy relationship. It’s genuinely miles better now. It’s because he loves what we do, because our relationships are with the CEOs and chairmen; they’re important to us. We talk a lot and he’s been fantastic in terms of new business.”

In other words Sorrell and Rudd trade contacts to mutual advantage. Which is how the new world of financial PR works.

Sometimes, though, the world can get quite cosy. One of Rudd’s oldest friends is the journalist Hugo Dixon (the two worked together for David Owen and the SDP after Oxford). Dixon is the founder of Breakingviews, which was partly owned by Rudd for a decade (before being sold to Reuters). Wasn’t this all a bit too close? He disagrees.

“On balance it probably made it less helpful for my clients. Sometimes I think they were tougher on my clients, just to prove a point.”

His friendship with Peston has also raised eyebrows. It was Peston who broke the story on Northern Rock; Northern Rock was a client of Finsbury. Rudd again looks unmoved at the connection. “Clients know perfectly well I would never leak anything that hadn’t been preordained and discussed. And secondly, when people get stories, particularly somebody as good as Robert, he never writes it on the basis of one person.”

Just supposing, I ask, I was interested in building up my own network like Rudd’s. How would I begin? Easy, he says. Simply ring up some big names in different areas and invite them over for an excellent dinner. But what if I didn’t know them? “They’d come,” he says confidently.

Thus, once a fortnight, Rudd assembles an assortment of famous guests at his vast house in Holland Park around a table that seats 18. Halfway through dinner, he hits fork against glass and insists they discuss the themes that Rudd loves – the wonders of the European Union, or the alternative vote (for which he unsuccessfully campaigned early this year). “It’s great fun,” he insists.

He then says it would be helpful to broaden the circle, as he has done, by being on the board of the Royal Opera House, a trustee of the Tate, on the board of the Army and involved in a few charities.

This sort of lifestyle works better if you have a partner who doesn’t mind if you go out every night of the week. Rudd’s wife, Sophie Hale, a designer of ball gowns, seems happy to play along, perhaps because the network has benefits for her too. Rudd puts on shows for her collections, inviting clients and acting as the compère himself. “I say: ‘Now we’ve got so and so wearing this lovely long red dress with sequins.’ It’s great fun,” he says again.

Roland Rudd as President of the Oxford Union, with US televangelist Jerry Falwell (left) and then New Zealand prime minister David Lange, Oxford, 1985

Such endless powerful partying doesn’t sound at all fun to me, but Rudd loves it. Even if he didn’t, there are two other reasons for keeping going. The first is ambition. When he was a schoolboy he wanted to be prime minister. And when at Oxford (he attended the little-known theological college, Regent’s Park) he was so keen to be president of the Oxford Union he tried three times before succeeding. Even though he didn’t make PM he has enough soft power to put him in the rankings of the country’s most influential people. “Obviously one takes some pleasure from that,” he says smoothly.

Rudd is also unashamedly in it for the money. At his birthday party his father, a retired stockbroker, told a story about Rudd as a schoolboy taking a train to Millfield, his sporty boarding school. He went up and down the carriages flogging Mars bars to his cronies, starting the journey skint and arriving flush.

And flush he has remained. This year he has been paid £3.1m, which is quite a lot when you think that the company itself only makes a bit over twice that in profit and has not grown for two years.

“I might put it slightly differently,” he says, and starts telling me a convoluted story about how fast the company grew from 2001 to 2008. But the true story is simpler: Finsbury is all about Rudd. He creates most of the income, he gets most of the spoils.

We then start to talk about the US merger and his first triumphal visit to the US to meet his new staff.

“Sometimes we can be a little bit cynical about the Americans being too heart-on-the-sleeve, but it’s quite sweet because they clapped me in at the beginning as well as at the end. They don’t do that here.”

At this point his PA puts her head around the door and says that he has a plane to catch. Rudd is off on holiday to Corfu. Can he network there, I ask.

“Sadly, Jacob Rothschild is not going to be there, but he has an amazing place very close by.”

I reel off some remaining questions. Would he like a seat in the Lords? It “wouldn’t be unattractive”. Should he spend more time with his wife and three children? Probably.

Did anyone rehearse him for this? He gives a final mirthless laugh. “Do you know, they actually didn’t. Do you think they ought to have?”

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