More than four decades into his eagle-eyed scrutiny of power and wealth in Britain, Anthony Sampson can still swoop on his prey at a speed that puts other journalistic sleuths to shame. At the end of our interview in a Mayfair hotel, a ludicrously elongated white stretch limo with smoked-glass windows draws up outside. Instantly, Sampson jumps up to see who is getting out of it.
This time, for once, the quarry eludes him. It may well have been one of the “populist tycoons” in leisure, services and showbiz who take centre stage in his latest, sharpest and most radical “anatomy of Britain”, Who Runs This Place?* This fresh elite of super-rich anti-elitists emerges as the driving force of a country that shook off its old deference to rank only to bow and scrape before the masters of the marketplace, “a new Establishment, with greater resources and stronger bonds than the old one - the bonds of money”.
Ever since the first Anatomy* in 1962, he has sought with steely detachment to strip away the screens that surround British power, whether erected (as then) by titled bankers in some Lombard Street boardroom or (as now) by self-made TV moguls in a Covent Garden restaurant.
On the political front, his latest quest coincided with an extraordinary - but taxing - opportunity to see the new lie of the land. Late in the composition of Who Runs This Place?,* the evidence submitted to the Hutton inquiry¹ (see cartoon below!) lit up the concealed pathways of power in Westminster and Whitehall “like a flare in the night sky”: Showing all the pace and nous² that writers half-a-century younger often lack, he quickly threaded the Hutton revelations through the book to devastating effect. They confirm his diagnosis that “decisions are actually taken by small groups of people, most of them unelected and unaccountable”.