SIMON MATTHEWS watches James Dearden’s 1999 movie Rogue Trader.
David Frost’s career as a film producer attracts less attention than his role as the world’s most famous, and supposedly toughest, interviewer. Perhaps deservedly so. Despite starting with a promising black comedy about an amoral future prime minister, The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970), it quickly descended to chocolate-box entertainments like The Slipper and the Rose (1976) and by the 80s consisted of Spitting Image TV specials. But he remained on the look out for interesting projects and in 1996, he optioned the rights to Nick Leeson’s account of how Baring’s Bank crashed.
Production was entrusted to Granada Films, an offshoot of the regional ITV franchise, who secured twenty-eight-year-old Ewan McGregor – superhot from Trainspotting (despite a turkey like Velvet Goldmine), and just taking up his part in the Star Wars franchise – to play Leeson.
He does so with a cockney accent, reminding us that Leeson was a quintessential product of the Thatcher era: a Watford wide boy with six ‘O’ Levels and two ‘A’ Levels, who got a job at Coutts in Lombard Street when he was eighteen. McGregor, as Leeson, provides an explanatory narration throughout and after only five minutes is referencing key buzzwords like ‘emerging markets’ and ‘tiger economies’, access to which – apparently – only became possible after ‘Maggie opened up the city.’
After a spell at Morgan Stanley, he moves to Baring’s in 1989. They send him out to Indonesia, from where he transfers to Singapore three years later. Co-star Anna Friel, formerly in Brookside, turns up at this point as Leeson’s squeaky-voiced girlfriend, and later wife, Lisa.
He is now head of a team of ‘traders’ – all kitted out in absurd matching striped blazers – who spend a lot of time shouting in a rugby scrum as they wheel and deal ‘derivatives’ and other incomprehensible items on the trading floor. The skullduggery begins only fifteen minutes into the film when he corrects an error made by one of his staff. He does so, makes back the losses by placing a stupendous bet on how the market will move, and is much lauded by his managers.
He gets into the habit of doing this, and for a time lounges about in a world of massive bonuses and extravagant spending. He buys himself a Porsche. Due to the scale of his profits, auditors are sent out from London. One of these, Ron Baker, an Australian, is played by the UK actor Nigel Lindsay as a Gordon Gekko-type character and portrayed as much worse than Leeson.
Things quickly reach a high emotional pitch. Lisa has a miscarriage and wants to leave Singapore. Nick becomes reckless, his losses mount and he forges documents to cover them. Eventually they reach £830m and Baring’s collapses. Nick and Lisa flee by plane but are apprehended in Germany. He is returned to Singapore, convicted and sentenced to six-and-a-half years in Changi. Lisa leaves him for another man, and later works as a flight attendant for Virgin Atlantic. With help from asset manager Edward Whitley, Nick writes Rogue Trader: How I Brought Down Barings Bank and Shook the Financial World (1996), after which David Frost arrives in prison to interview him.
It didn’t take Frost long to make his film. It premiered on 25 June 1999, a month prior to Leeson’s release from prison, suffering from colon cancer. (He survived.) Response was muted. As drama it was curiously tame, with nothing like the visceral power of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) or Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013, but based on a Jordan Belfort memoir set in roughly the same period). A lot of music punctuates the narrative, as it does in Scorsese’s film, but there is none of the violence, uninhibited sex, and industrial quantities of drugs. It’s all very polite, very English. The worst that Leeson does is moon his arse at some women in a Singapore bar, which gets him a fine for indecency.
There are bigger points struggling to be made here. Firstly, the portrait of British ex-pat life in Singapore is very unflattering. Secondly, in political-economic terms this shows what the regression of the traditional nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Empire (the subjugation and administration of vast territories), back to an earlier seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version (based purely on trade), looks like today. The private companies that initiated the enterprise remain in the driving seat and their ethos of extracting value, at any cost, is what we see on screen. But they are also curiously limited, inept even, with the posh people at the top of Baring’s (founded 1762) no better at dealing with Leeson’s rampages than Percival’s staff officers were in fending off the Japanese in 1942.
It might have been intriguing to present Leeson as a contemporary Clive of India figure, a vulgar, aggressive, working-class youth who makes good east of Suez. There was something to be done here: a state of the nation film about what (and who) actually drives the UK economy. But this is bland, rather like Frost’s TV programmes, and, remains strangely uncritical, pulling its punches. After all, why is there so little regulation of Baring’s activities? What qualifications does Leeson have? A degree in economics? Why is he allowed such gigantic leeway at the age of twenty-five?
None of these points are addressed. At the end of the day this is a film starring Ewan McGregor. Trainspotting was about heroin. This is about money.
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