Branson

The Virgin story most people know is one of scrappy insurgency: a record shop, then a label, then an airline that took on British Airways and won. Bower tells a more tangled version. The record business was real and, for a time, lucrative — Virgin Records signed the Sex Pistols, Mike Oldfield, Culture Club and others, and it was the eventual sale of that label to EMI in 1992, for around one billion dollars, that funded much of what followed. Branson reportedly wept as he signed it away. It was also the moment that revealed how the empire really worked: cash generated in one venture propping up the ambitions of another.

Virgin, Bower argues, was never a single company in any conventional sense. It was a loose constellation of separately owned businesses, many registered offshore, linked chiefly by the brand name and by Branson's personal stake. Profits and losses could be moved, presented and obscured across this structure in ways that made the group's true health difficult for outsiders to read. The image of a unified, thriving empire was, in part, an accounting effect — and a deliberate one.

If there is a hero in Bower's account, it is public relations. From early on, Branson understood that a story printed for free was worth more than an advertisement paid for, and that a photograph of him doing something absurd would run everywhere. He made himself endlessly available, endlessly quotable, and endlessly willing — posing nude, wearing a wedding dress to launch Virgin Brides, hanging off buildings. Editors got a guaranteed picture. Branson got a guaranteed brand.

Bower details the machinery that kept the image clean. Unflattering stories were fought hard, through lawyers and through the personal charm that made journalists reluctant to turn on so likeable a subject. Battles Branson lost were reframed as battles bravely fought. The famous 'dirty tricks' litigation against British Airways in the early 1990s — which Virgin won, extracting a public apology and damages — became the founding legend of the plucky underdog, and it was a genuine victory. But Bower notes how effectively even genuine victories were converted into a permanent narrative of persecuted virtue.

Step back from the individual episodes and Branson becomes a study in something larger: what happens when a personal brand outgrows the business beneath it. Bower's deeper subject is not whether Branson was a good or bad man but why the public was so willing to believe the flattering version, and so slow to check it against the accounts. The answer says as much about us as about him.

We like our capitalists to have a story. A faceless conglomerate that quietly compounds profits inspires nothing; a barefoot adventurer taking on the giants inspires loyalty, forgiveness, even affection. Branson supplied the narrative that made wealth feel likeable. He gave the impersonal machinery of commerce a human face, a sense of humour and an underdog's grievance — and in exchange, the public extended a trust that the underlying businesses had not necessarily earned on their own merits.

The plane that landed in Baghdad in 1991 was real, the hostages were real, and Branson was genuinely on board. Bower's point is never that the images were faked. It is that each one was doing more work than it appeared to — carrying a launch, deflecting a story, converting a stunt into affection that could be spent later. Told with all the witnesses in the room, the life looks less like a series of happy accidents and more like a sustained, disciplined act of self-construction by a man who understood the media age before most of his rivals did.