Sordid Sorrell tale does not ring true

Near where I work is a café that sells takeaways. When I am feeling flush (this is Mayfair after all, and that particular place is not cheap) I pop in and get my lunch. I’d be lying if I said that in my usual nosy manner I’d not noticed that the next door building housed what the notice on its door said was a “beautiful model”.

Dear Reader, I’ve never had anything spicier than a piece of quiche and three salads.

The reason I’m telling you this is that doorway, 50A Shepherd Market, is now famous or rather infamous – it’s also now firmly shut. For it’s where Sir Martin Sorrell, the advertising titan, is said to have paid a visit on 6 June 2017.

Apparently, the trip was witnessed by two employees at his WPP advertising colossus, who were seated at a table having a drink nearby. One of them photographed the door. In early 2018, more than six months later, again one of them confided in a senior colleague. A discussion was held, and the decision was taken to report Sorrell to the group chairman, Roberto Quarta.

Quarta and Nicole Seligman, senior non-executive director at WPP, set up a board sub-committee and hired an external law firm, Wilmer Hale, to carry out an independent investigation into Sorrell’s alleged misconduct involving the possible misuse of company funds.

This inquiry saw Sorrell being interviewed, after which he considered resigning. In truth, he’d been debating whether to go for a while, and the question was whether his fury at the investigation made him firm up a decision to quit.

In the end he chose to remain, but only until a succession plan had been put in place. Then came a leak to the Wall Street Journal of the existence of an investigation into his personal behaviour and whether any company funds had been misused.

Sorrell was enraged. When Wilmer Hale’s findings were presented to the board there was apparently no written report, and no proof was found of abuse of company funds. Sorrell had enough, and resigned regardless.

I want to return to the doorway claim. I wrote about it last week, and I make no bones about revisiting the allegation. Sorrell is a giant in his trade, responsible for building the world’s largest advertising and marketing concern home to some 400 subsidiary businesses, many of them extremely well known.

I’ve since talked to others, close to WPP, about his going. The company had hit a bad patch, the share price was falling and WPP was starting to seem out of sync with an industry that was moving towards faster, fleeter-footed, more digitally focused agencies. For once, Sorrell’s ebullience and grasp appeared to have deserted him. Questions were being asked about his age, 73, and his salary and expenses package.

But WPP without Sorrell was like battered fish without chips – it was hard to conceive of one without the other. Unseating him, if that was what was called for, would prove difficult – and without a successor in place, extremely dangerous.

More and more, though, it looks via my sceptical eye that Sorrell was put under such pressure as to resign, that a pretext was created – perhaps not deliberately, but was allowed to develop – that made his position untenable.

Take 50A, the plain door at the centre of the murky affair. There is no bar there, where drinkers stand or sit outside, that has a clear view of the doorway.

I know, because I’ve checked it out. There’s a wine bar, which is often quiet, with two tables at the front, but that’s to the side, down a passageway – and from those tables it is impossible to have direct sight of the front of 50A. It would be impossible to tell, for instance, which of the three apartments in the building someone was visiting. There is nowhere else. There are three pubs in Shepherd Market that are regularly busy, and groups do gather on the pavement, but 50A is not visible from any of them.

Is it possible that Sorrell was elsewhere in Shepherd Market that night? He’s a regular at 5 Hertford Street, the members’ club very close to the wine bar and 50A. He might have been there, might have been in the vicinity, but the claim was that he entered 50A.

Who was the employee who reported their boss, after six months, and sparked the chain of events leading to Sorrell’s resignation? Do they do this sort of thing, at WPP, formally report on colleagues’ private lives?

Did the law firm really produce no report? If not, why not? In my experience of too many dealings with lawyers, they always love to commit everything to paper. Did they set up an investigation only to examine this one allegation – or were they actually engaged in a widespread fishing expedition, of which this was just one part, and which found absolutely nothing of any consequence?

And to the leak. On that sort of highly sensitive internal disciplinary matter, involving such a senior figure, the circle of those who knew what was going on would have been very tight. It’s unlikely it emanated from those around Sorrell or from Wilmer Hale. It had to have come from within WPP or someone close to the few people at the organisation who knew what was going on. The fact it was made to the Wall Street Journal smacks of a source who wanted to put distance between themselves and the domestic UK media, who perhaps did not have full confidence in their name not getting out.

It’s all very strange. Certainly, if I was a shareholder of WPP, faced with a change in leader and no future obvious successor, I would not be pleased. Until proved to the contrary, what has occurred smacks of artifice, possibly of personal scores being settled. I would not be happy at seeing my company being used in such a fashion.

Chris Blackhurst is a former editor of The Independent, and executive director of CTF Partners, the campaigns and strategic communications advisery firm.