![]() ![]() The whole foul experience, though, undoubtedly helped inform his thinking. Writing articles criticising bad regulation in non-financial areas, and criticising excessive regulation – also in non-financial areas – as part of a wider critique of government fallibility is the closest I've come. But, he says, "I never 'lobbied' for deregulation, let alone in financial services. ![]() It's true that he once wrote, in a 2006 article, that "the more we limit the growth of government, the better off we will all be". He wanted less regulation, his critics said – and look at the result. Other critics, notably the environmentalist and Guardian writer George Monbiot, were harsher, arguing that Ridley's writings promoted a "geneticist's version of the market", amounting to a call for precisely the kind of libertarian, anti-regulation, non-interventionist approach that, applied to banks, had precipitated the global financial crisis. So Ridley came in for a fair amount of stick for his part in the Northern Rock debacle, not least before a parliamentary committee, where he was castigated for not "recognising the risks of the bank's strategy" and "harming the reputation of the British banking industry". Those with chairmen who had more relevant experience got into just as much trouble." The main problem was: "Like everyone living in a bubble, you don't know you are." "Of course I was unqualified, but the mantra at the time was that banks needed people with independent experience. "I was on the board of quite a few companies in the north-east by that time," he says. Born to a noble Northumberland family (Ridley's father, Matthew, is the fourth Viscount Ridley his uncle was Nicholas, the late member of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet the family pile, Blagdon Hall, is a Grade I-listed mansion in 8,500 acres) whose fortunes were assured by "a spectacularly successful 18th-century coal merchant", Matt was the third generation of the family to sit on Northern Rock's board. It seemed, presumably, a sensible thing to do at the time. But the problem is that every time I try to work out how I can go on the record about it, I end up having to go into detail. There's not a week I don't think about it. "I'm truly sorry," he says over coffee in the cafeteria at the Centre for Life, the award-winning life sciences centre in Newcastle he helped found. In the meantime, he's sorry about the Northern Rock business. Ridley, you see, has the temerity to believe that life on earth can only get better, and the state of the earth itself with it – not a view, one imagines, guaranteed to win him instant and universal adulation. Thankfully, his new book is original, clever and will – you can just tell – prove controversial enough to compensate for this early setback. He must, therefore, have a few stories to tell.
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