When you can't eat a curry without having a euro forced down your throat

Spectator, The, Feb 19, 2000 by Johnson, Boris

There I was, pootling down Gray's Inn Road on my bicycle, brooding, as usual, on economic and monetary union, when I almost fell off. I swerved, causing a woman on a moped to swear. I stopped and gaped. For months the suspicion has been building that the business folk of Britain are not being entirely straight with the pollsters. This very week, when Hague and Portillo are on their battlebus, flourishing their pound coins, the Business for Sterling mob announces that we've won.

An astounding 73 per cent of British businesses do not want the euro. They won't be doing with it, say Business for Sterling. Anyway, it would cost the nation 36 billion to switch from pounds to euros, which is roughly what we spend on the NHS. The euro, say the Business for Sterling propagandists, is about as popular with small businesses as a wet pair of socks. Sterling, says Business for Sterling, is what Business wants; and, of course, I believe them. It is just that for months, cycling around London at my geriatric pace, my paranoia has been mounting.

The thing about business people is that they follow the market. Their eyes are peeled, their ears are tuned to what people want, the words they respond to in making their commercial decisions. And no one observing the business culture of London in the third millennium can have failed to spot the prevalence of the word 'euro'. It's everywhere; it's spreading like some Continental pox from shop front to shop front. It has gone beyond Eurostar and Euromoney and Eurotravel. No, what chills the marrow of the moderate Eurosceptic, what makes us fear that business is already hedging its bets, is to see a company called Euro Dry Cleaning, or Euro Plumbing, or Euro Food and Wine, and now, to take the cake and almost knock me off my bike, what do I see here in Gray's Inn Road? An Indian restaurant, oxymoronically called Euro Tandoori.

Now, these restaurateurs are very shrewd business folk and, if they think that the word euro is now more appealing than Taj Mahal, if they think it beats Kismet and Rajmoni and Star of Bengal as a means of enticing you within, then that is the moment to begin to panic about the true state of business sentiment towards sterling. And when, with feverish fingers I flick through Thomson's local directory, my fears seem confirmed. There are at least 300 companies whose names are prefixed by the word 'euro', and only 22 which use the word 'sterling'. I am on the point of ringing Nick Herbert, the chief executive of Business for Sterling, to break the bad news, when I stay my hand.

Call yourself a journalist? hisses my conscience. What about the businessmen themselves? Perhaps it would be worth trying to discover what the words connote in their own imaginations; and slowly, as I ring round London, my mood starts to lighten. 'Euro? says Mr Gaziur Khaman, a waiter at Euro Tandoori. He is not sure what the significance of the word is, but he seems to think it means a kind of curry, possibly in Gujarati or Tamil. He does not believe it has any implications for the future of Britain's fiscal and monetary independence. At the Euro Sandwich Bar in Swallow Street, my inquiry is received with audible embarrassment. 'It was here when I bought it,' barks the sandwich-- maker. 'I'm a little busy.' Click. Brrr.

At Europlumbing, the proprietor, Senor Antonio Victor of Lisbon, says that he thinks 'euro' is a good word, since he comes from the Continent of Europe, but that unfortunately he now has a very bad back, and that he may have to take the business to Portugal, where he will call it Eurocanalisador. At Euro Wines in North End Road, the name seems to mean absolutely nothing to Mr Goridas Kodisawaran. 'It is Euro. Name is Euro. I am not understand you,' he says. And at Euro Temple, a shop selling handbags and sunglasses in Berwick Street, there is a similar unwillingness to make anything of the associations of the word. 'I haven't put the name by myself,' says Mr Ali Aziz, though, when taxed, he says that it implies something new (euro) and something old (temple).

The most sheepish of all is Michael Stopford of Euro Property Services, 29 Margravine Road. The name Euro has no bearing on his business, which is to supply and install air-conditioning. 'At the time we set up the company it was trendy, so to speak. That was the main reason. We thought it sounded sensible.'

In short, no one who had adopted 'Euro' saw any particular advantage in the name except that it sounded vaguely new and, somehow, as though it suggested a firm with wide horizons. Contrast the confidence and certainty of those few, those happy few, who continue to use the word ,sterling'.

'We were aiming at something at the deluxe end,' says Alan Mellins, managing director of Sterling Travel. We are aiming at the kind of client who stays at four- or five-star hotels, and we feel that sterling implies solidity, quality, value. Even if sterling is abolished, it will continue to mean quality, reliability, longevity: all the things we want to convey to our customers.' And no, if and when the Blair government bounces Britain into the single currency, he will certainly not be changing the name to Euro Travel.