James Allcock RIP, rogue [2]

Continued from last week

So what disturbed Allcock's stately scam ship as it sailed serenely through the market?  The first issue arose in the mid '80s when the laws of supply / demand / price caught up with him, as they always do eventually.  You can suspend the laws of nature, but only for as long as you are willing to throw money at it.  

What happened was this.  He'd secured vast quantities of gas at ultra low prices (the units don't matter, but it was single-digit pence per therm) in the late '60s and early '70s - see part 1.  This was amply sufficient, right through the 70's.  But by the '80s there had been two oil crises, 1973 and 1979; and the price of oil had risen tenfold (sic).  The prices BG was paying for its gas had jogged upwards a bit with inflation and other adjustments, but nothing on that scale.  So the big producers, who were always oil companies au fond,[1] stopped drilling for gas, concentrating on the still bounteous North Sea oil reserves.  There were whole years in the '80s where not a single gas well was drilled - not for exploration, nor even for extending already-producing gas fields.  A complete gas-investment strike by the producers.  BG did the sums, and correctly assessed they'd be facing a supply crisis in due course.  And new gasfields took an absolute minimum of 2 years to bring onstream[2], often much longer if outright new exploration was to be involved.

Still, BG had a monopoly to go with its monopsony, and they knew who was going to pay for the business of digging them out of that hole - its captive customers!  So Allcock did the rounds of the big producers, intimating that BG was now willing to pay prices above 20 p/th - a huge increase - for any new gas fields they could bring to the table in the next few years.  This, of course, set off a new round of stately and highly enjoyable negotiations I described last time, as the producers dug down into the archives for overlooked gas discoveries, and indeed started drilling again for new resources.  It worked: high prices have that effect.  (I've written before about another, hilarious aspect of this episode as the crazy, artificial boom-and-bust cycle ran its inevitable course.)  Thus did Allcock and his monopoly powers - a dismally blunt instrument indeed - avert the first storm that broke over his head.

The second, however, was to be terminal, albeit a protracted affair.  On purely ideological grounds, Nigel Lawson persuaded Thatcher to privatise BG, a task given to Peter Walker.  To make a long story short, in 1986 he succeeded in getting the public to buy the shares ("Tell Sid", for those with 40-year memories), and the legislation ended BG's de jure monopoly / monopsony.  But it did nothing to eliminate or even, in the short- to medium-term undermine, its de facto stranglehold, not least because in the initial legislation, no regulator was appointed!  

And it was Allcock who commanded BG's first and highly effective line of defence: making sure no other bugger could obtain gas with which to go into competition with the monopoly.  In the next part we'll tell the story of his long, ruthless but ultimately unsuccessful rearguard action.  And, no, I haven't forgotten the promised account of the colourful abuses of its monopoly that BG perpetrated over the years - some of which will feature in part 3 and others in a later episode.

ND

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[1] Gas was always seen as a more-or-less unwanted by-product - something that came up from most oil-wells anyway, or something you discovered, disappointingly, when you'd really been looking for oil.  In some places around the world, by-product gas was simply flared

[2] A lead time as short as 2 years would be for a geologically simple gas field in shallow waters, close to existing infrastructure, that had already been discovered but never developed because the price BG had been willing to pay was just too low - the producer had better uses for its development budget

Starmer's China Triumph: errr ... visa-free travel!

The scene: a small, bare office on an industrial estate near Beijing Capital International airport.  Sitting nervously on a metal chair, nursing a plastic beaker of water and facing a plain table adorned with two small pennants, one a Union Jack and the other the Chinese flag, is The Most Important Man In Government Jonathan Powell, legendary Xi-whisperer (self-styled) and Starmer's right-hand man on all foreign matters. 

A loud voice off, shouting into room:   You bow low!

Powell leaps to his feet, turns to face the figure walking in through the door and doubles over at the waist with as much gravitas as he can muster.

Enter Yu Bau-Lo, 3rd Deputy Under Secretary at the Chinese Ministry of Protocol.  

Yu:  Mr Powell, get up.  Very busy.  Have many executions of Ming gang to supervise.  What you want?

Powell:   Err, Mr Yu, greetings ... I, err, we, err, came good with the approval for your new London embassy, just like we discussed.

Yu:  Yes.  So what?

Powell:   Err,  we were, err, hoping there might be something in return?  Something big, that Sir Kier could announce?  

Yu:  He could say "I got to meet President Xi.  In person.  Camera present, photo taken."  This is great honour.  Everyone in world deeply impressed.

Powell:  Err, we were hoping for something, like, err, tangible? 

Yu:  We will send copy of photograph meeting with President Xi.  Can have framed.

Powell:   But, but ... we need a deal - everyone needs a deal these days!

Yu:  OK, (looks through notebook entitled "Sops") - we give you visa-free travel!  Big concession - only Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, EU, Canada, Turkey etc etc etc get visa-free travel.  North Korea desperate for visa-free travel!

Powell, crestfallen:   Surely there must be something more than that?  The embassy ...

Yu:  Don' push luck Mr Powell.  OK, final word: half-rate tariff on Scotch whisky.  

Powell, utterly crushed:  Thanks ... we're very grateful.

Yu, turning to leave as shots ring out offstage:  OK.  You go now.  (With back turned)  Anyhow, Chinese people don' drink Scotch any more - Indian whisky really good these days**.

As overheard by ND

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** It's true!

Would he, wouldn't he? Yes, "Burnham Would"

Sorry, but the Macbeth idiom is irresistible.  Presumably, after a full week of letting it be understood that any move by Burnham would be stopped dead in its tracks by the NEC, the Mcsweeney coven was hoping that he is

... not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it

But no: whichever witches our Andy encountered on Newton Heath knew their man better: 

When you durst do it, then you were a man

The Mcsweeney bluff was in truth a really easy one to call.  So they block Burnham tomorrow: what chance then, for whatever hapless stooge Labour puts up in the by-election?  "I know you all really wanted Andy ... but I'm hoping you'll support me now ..."  A great rallying cry indeed, with only the thin chance of a haphazard but possibly lucky 3-way split to save Gorton & Denton for Labour.  

Shakespeare again: let's imagine Mcsweeney's day-dream.  The scene is some darkened Labour office in Manchester: Mcsweeney has Burnham marched in, sits him down, offers him a cup of instant coffee and says

Yeah, right, in his dreams.  For, (at dearieme's suggestion BTL) Burnham replies:

                      That's all you've got?  Thou knave, thou dunce inane

                      Starmer will rue the day he gave you rein! 

Great spectator sport.  Amusing, too, to see Miliband's response for the cameras yesterday, impishly saying Burnham would be "a massive asset" in Parliament and that he hoped Gorton and Denton party members would have "the option" of selecting him as a candidate.   He also hopes, of course, that Burnham would make him Chancellor.

More popcorn!

ND

© Nick Drew 2026

Mayor Burnham! - may I deign to call you Andy?

We all do have the high'st regard for you 

Rogues I Have Known: James Allcock, part 1

Pic:  Daily Telegraph

There won't be many readers who have heard of James Allcock (died at the age of 90, obit here, which you should maybe read first). De mortuis nil nisi bonum, obviously; and I'll immediately say, he was a very nice guy who commanded tremendous loyalty, which (generally) speaks well for a man.  But he was also, how shall we say, a tough customer.  Being, as he was, the head buyer for the old British Gas when it was a monopoly.  I shall explain.  At length.

BG took on the form we most associate with it when North Sea gas hove into view in the late '60s.  The late (and not very lamented) Dennis Rooke was given responsibility for converting the nation rapidly from town gas to natural gas, in which he succeeded, using methods that left a lasting and very equivocal legacy - a story for another day.   It seems from the above-referenced obit, Allcock (I never knew this) had a hand in it, too.

However, it was in his prime as BG's head buyer of gas from upstream producers that I first met him.  Did I say 'buyer'?  BG enjoyed, not only a statutory monopoly, but also a monopsony, which it enforced zealously.  So if your company had discovered gas in the North Sea (and later, off the west coast, too), you had nowhere to go but to headmaster Allcock's study.  The only question was, how painful the experience was going to be.  He had only two forces providing a weak form of discipline on his rapacity:  (a) some customers (particularly industrials)[1] still had the ability to use alternative fuels, mostly oil of one grade or another; and (b) the Norwegians, at least, had alternative outlets for their gas.  Otherwise, he could generally have his wicked way with you; and he & his opposite numbers in equally monopsonistic European utilities used to swap notes gleefully on how roughly they'd rogered their victims.

That said, he was a perfect gentleman, and built a department consisting of three teams of negotiators to carry out his purchasing policy.  You need to know that these negotiations were for astonishing amounts of gas, since Allcock insisted on buying the entire quantity of gas in a given field, which might be producing the stuff for as many as 50 years[2].  So the amounts of money on the table were correspondingly stupendous; the sellers were very big companies themselves (basically, the '7 Sisters' of yore plus the Norwegians, and various hangers-on); and the negotiations were interminable.  Two years for the sale of a single large field's gas was par for the course. 

Each of his teams was led by another perfect gentleman[3] and some courteous juniors, whose conduct was extremely stylised in the oriental fashion.  There were three juniors to a team, and each had their allotted role.  #2 would occasionally get to speak out loud in the meetings; #3 might get to whisper something to #2; and #4 was silent, taking notes.  There would also always be one or more of BG's exceptionally proprietorial external lawyers, who did all the drafting.  Indeed, all the meetings were held at the offices of BG's lawyers, the then firm of Denton Hall Burgin & Warren.  This was to the advantage of all the participating negotiators, since lunch came in the form of a Fortnum's hamper, and the fridge was well stocked too.

Thus, it was possible to be thoroughly rogered by Allcock and his teams, and enjoy the whole process greatly.   One or two of the juniors might have been redbrick, but inevitably the main players on all sides (whichever oil company was selling its gas) were Oxbridge: even the US sellers, and in some cases the Norwegians, made sure to field the "right people" for this arcane negotiation ritual.  Literary references (which would sometimes find their way into the drafting) and Latin jokes were prized currency.

This stately and splendid abuse of BG's statutory powers lasted from the late '60s to the early 90's.  Allcock had to weather a couple of storms - which he did with panache - before eventually competition started developing for real, as I'll describe in part 2.  I'll also give some examples of the outrageous abuse of its monopoly BG perpetrated when this regime still had the power to do so.  

And, to cut to the chase for part 1, Allcock - in his urbane manner - fought the onset of competition all the way.  Given that BG retained a de facto monopoly/monopsony for years after it lost its statutory rights, and never lost its natural monopoly on the pipeline system until it relinquished it voluntarily by demerger, his powers to do so were baleful and very great.  But when, in the early 90's, it was manifestly almost over for his way of doing business, I had a drink with him one day and asked him this: why this stubborn rearguard defence, when the end-point was clear?  I drew the analogy with Germany's immense WW2 losses on the Eastern front: if they'd called it quits after Kursk, say, and fallen back in good order to the German border, Berlin may never have fallen to Russia[4].  As it was, fighting for every hectare they lost countless men for arguably a much worse result.  Likewise, BG was (at the time I posed the question) still mulishly refusing to concede market share, and using its enduring natural monopoly on the pipeline system to make life as difficult as possible for its new competitors, once they arrived on the scene, even knowing that there was every intention on the part of government to make sure the new entrants succeeded.  If BG had fallen back on its then-remaining de jure monopoly of the residential gas market (which it didn't lose until much later) - devilishly difficult for competitors to make inroads into, and not nearly as profitable as the infinitely more accessible industrial & commercial sectors - it could have held that till kingdom come.

He smiled, poured us another drink, and said: "Every day's delay is another monopoly pound in our pockets."

More to follow.  In the meantime: RIP, James, you old rogue. 

ND

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[1] For a sustained period until the late 1980s it was illegal in the UK, and in most of Europe and the USA, too, to use natural gas for power generation .  Bizarre, but true.

[2] The largest North Sea gas field, Leman, started production in 1969 and is still producing to this day

[3] In the early years, at least - things changed towards the end, but, no names, no packdrill 

[4] A counterfactual for the historians, obviously.  But it served my illustrative purpose.

Trump charts new extremes of human nature

At the weekend I read this short piece, entitled:

"Our Impossibly Small-souled President"

The author, one Jeffrey Blehar, is no great artist or philosopher - but his coinage, small-souled trashiness, is on point.  And mention of 'small-souledness' inevitably brings to mind the classic descriptive accounts of the Great-Souled Man, starting with the ancient Greeks - Homer, Plato, Aristotle - amplified by Shakespeare, Goethe (to an extent) and of course Nietzsche.  Let's keep the citations to a minimum and satisfy ourselves with extracts from Aristotle's canonical account: 

The great-souled man is fond of conferring benefits, but ashamed to receive them ... He returns a service done to him with interest ... It is also characteristic of great-souled men never to ask help from others, or only with great reluctance, but to render aid willingly; and to be haughty towards men of position or fortune, but courteous towards those of moderate station ... it is vulgar to lord it over humble people ... He must care more for the truth than for what people think ... he does not bear a grudge.

And so on.  It's not difficult to conclude that Trump embodies the exact antithesis of all this, in every dimension: quite an achievement.  Not in terms of great villainy - think Iago, Judas, or the Serpent - but great smallness!  And quite a remarkable state of affairs, that one such as he should be in the position he is.  Age, thou art shamed!  Rome, thou hast lost thy breeds of noble blood!

Of course, in literature the extremes of human nature are frequently documented in poetic depictions of tragedy.  We've no shortage of dramatic events in the flesh - but where is the great art that so often emerges from times of great turmoil?  If tragedy is the classic vehicle for depictions of the great-souled man, what is the medium for portraying his opposite?  Where is our Shakespeare, our Milton?

ND  

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Afterthought: though hardly a man of worldscale literary merit, we must note with dismay the passing of cartoonist Scott Adams, whose perspicacity in identifying Trump as The Man Most Likely To, way back before Trump's selection as Republican candidate first time around, was detailed, shrewd and very impressive.  All of a piece with the astute micro-insights delivered over the years by Dilbert.  Needless to say, the small-souled one managed to make his commentary on Adams' death all about himself.  Of course he did: I rest my case.

Venezuela through Russian and Chinese eyes

In the previous post I suggested: 

... the Venezuela adventure is ... forcing Putin to eat more shit as he is lamely reduced to asking that his tanker crew will be nicely looked after.  Yep, lots of random shit happens on Planet Trump ... both Russia and Xi are utterly dismayed, as ever, by the casual ease with which perfidious western nations sweep away years and even decades of patient strategic effort: this time Venezuela, the latest in a long series  

- that series including Libya, Syria and Iran-as-Middle-East-counterweight (and supplier of arms to Russia).

Taking Russia first: Putin really had set a lot of strategic store by Venezuela - proportionately, a lot more than Xi, for whom these things are merely road-bumps, however annoying and tactically unpredictable.  Ditto Syria, ditto Iran.  Putin is beholden to N.Korea, FFS, at the same time as trying to project a superpower profile, so these setbacks are pretty hard to swallow.  The Bear with the sore head is unlikely to cut anyone any favours on its western borders, witness the performative missile strike on Lviv; but he'll be watching Iran with an awful sense of déjà-vue doom.  Where to parade his plonker now, except in the Donbas?

China looks very different.  Xi pretty much believes in regional hegemony!  So Venezuela may be a bit of a setback to a maturing long-term plan, and oil is oil; but hey, Taiwan is the only thing he really cares about, period.  

Also, he's looking forward to wiping the floor with Trump - again - this year.  He played Trump brutally last year.  You say 'tariffs', Mr Trump?  Nope, and we raise you rare earth metals.  Now, hand over your very best chips, lots of them, before we reduce your remaining industries to rust and dust ... That's the way, Donald, there's a good boy.  Now run along.

And 2026 is the mid-terms ...  Venezuela, pffft.  Trump and Xi are scheduled for a couple of summits this year, and the Chinese will be expecting to ream him again.  What else of gigantic strategic value will Trump give away this time?  The dawning of the Chinese era stands to be accelerated materially in just a few months. Scary stuff. 

ND

UPDATE:  see thread below - this is getting complicated !  

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/17/china-blocks-nvidia-h200-ai-chips-that-us-government-cleared-for-export-report