Balen, Malcolm 1956-

views updated

BALEN, Malcolm 1956-

PERSONAL:

Born February 9, 1956; son of Henry and Elswyth (Honor) Balen. Education: Peterhouse College, Cambridge, B.A.

ADDRESSES:

Office—London Television Centre, 1 Upper Ground, London SE1 9LT, England.

CAREER:

Journalist and author. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), London, England, news trainee, 1978, regional journalist, Manchester, 1980-82; Channel Four News/Independent Television News (ITN), London, senior programming editor, 1989-94; BBC Nine o'Clock News, editor, 1994-97, BBC-TV and Radio News Bulletin, executive editor, 1997-2000; Independent Television (ITV), London, head of news, 2000—; appointed as editorial consultant on Middle East news coverage for the BBC, 2003. Occasional lecturer for the Council of Europe, 2000—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award, 1991, for Channel 4 coverage of resignation of Margaret Thatcher.

WRITINGS:

Kenneth Clarke, Fourth Estate (London, England), 1994.

A Very English Deceit: The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble and the First Great Financial Scandal, Fourth Estate (London, England), 2002, also published as The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble: The World's First Great Financial Scandal, Fourth Estate (New York, NY), 2003, and as The King, the Crook, and the Gambler: The True Story of the South Sea Bubble and the Greatest Financial Scandal in History, Fourth Estate (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS:

British journalist Malcom Balen is a television news editor who has also published two books. Balen's first book was a biography of Tory politician Kenneth Clarke. Kenneth Clarke was written in the 1990s when Clarke was chancellor of the Exchequer and seemed likely to become the next prime minister of England. Several years later, Balen wrote about an eighteenth-century trading scandal known as the South Sea Bubble. The scandal still sheds light on how investors, rather than government officials and corporate bosses, are hurt the most by large-scale fraud.

Kenneth Clarke is a portrait of a man who made his way up the political ladder by working in the departments of Transport, Employment, Health, Trade and Industry. According to Andrew Rawnsley, writing in the Manchester Guardian, the book "rounds out the standard view of Clarke as a thug with a heart" and is "well-researched and wittily written, the analysis as strong as the anecdotes." "The biography was well worth reading, even if it appears like a literary equivalent of the Nine o'Clock News," Anthony Seldon commented in the Times Educational Supplement. Seldon went on to note, "He writes with spice and wit, tells a good semi-insider account of a man who, even if he fails to become Prime Minister, will have been one of the more interesting, eccentric and humane Tories to have graced British politics in the 1980s and 1990s."

For British readers, The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble: The World's First Great Financial Scandal was likely an episode "more famous than familiar," according to the London Financial Times writer Christopher Silvester. But the story (published under two other title variations) proved to have special resonance for a larger audience following scandals concerning WorldCom, Enron, and the collapse of many dot-com companies. The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble discusses how the British South Sea Company sold shares with the empty promise of trading silver and spices from the Americas. Under the direction of John Blunt, the company also arranged to take over England's national debt and to pay creditors with shares rather than cash. Blunt spent more than a million pounds bribing officials. The scheme fell apart in 1720, leaving many investors penniless, but the government of King George I was effectively protected from damage.

Contemporary Review writer Michael Kaworski recommended the book as "a cautionary tale" that was "written in the racy style of a tabloid newspaper." Kaworski commented that "the book's most powerful lesson is that if determined individuals such as Law and Blunt can dictate how entire economies and nations perform, they could not do this without most people being prepared to act as lemmings or lambs to the slaughter." In a review for USA Today, Barrington Salmon called the work "captivating" and remarked that the author "makes it clear that though much has changed over time, the South Sea Bubble could happen again.… Read this book and be prepared."