Underwritten Weekly

Last week I locked myself out of my house.

Not a complicated one. One door. One lock. One set of keys that were, at the critical moment, absolutely definitely somewhere else. I stood on my own doorstep performing a little ritual of disbelief – checking the same four pockets in rotation, as though the keys might materialise if I showed sufficient commitment to the process.

I got in eventually through a window I’d love to tell you was cleverly chosen, and I’d love even more to tell you it was elegant. But there is nothing dignified about a forty-two-year-old man folding himself through a kitchen window, ass in the air, crawling over his sink, with the tap exactly where you don’t want it, in full view of his neighbours. Happily I made my peace with my loss of dignity some years ago, so at least we’re good on that front.

All of this got me thinking about locks, the people who trust them, and the people who very much don’t.

Because in April 2015, some men in their seventies had precisely the opposite problem to mine. They wanted to get into somewhere they very much should not have been able to.

In the jewellery quarter of London, just up the road from The Room, sat a vault. Hatton Garden Safe Deposit. Walls of reinforced concrete. Hundreds of boxes holding the irreplaceable possessions of dealers and families and jewellers who had been told, and had believed, that this was the safest room in the city.

It was sold as impregnable. That word did a lot of very expensive work.

Over the Easter bank holiday weekend, when London wasn’t really watching, a gang got in. They were not a sleek crew of athletic professionals like me. The ringleader was 76. Several wore hearing aids. One kept nodding off. They are widely and correctly regarded as the most gloriously implausible burglars in the history of British crime, and they got through the better part of half a metre of reinforced concrete with a drill they’d hired and a great deal of patience, because it turns out patience is one thing a 76-year-old man with a hearing aid has got plenty of.

They emptied the boxes. Walked out with somewhere in the region of £14 million in cash, gold and jewels. The safest room in London turned out to be just a room.

The Sunday Nonsense would like to thank you for your patience. The email equivalent of a rail replacement bus service has now arrived, and the inevitable insurance plot twist is finally here. We apologise for the delay to your Monday morning.

Long before any of it happened, somebody in our market had already priced that vault – not as impregnable, but as a building, with a door and walls, in a city, over a bank holiday, run by human beings who sometimes make mistakes. The specie underwriters – the quiet professionals who insure the portable, stealable, irreplaceable things of the world – had looked at the safest room in London and assumed, professionally and without drama, that it could be got into. Because that is their job. The people who built the vault believed the word impregnable. The people who insured its contents did not.

For those who hadn’t bought cover – who had looked at the reinforced concrete and the enormous locks and the word “Safe” written right there over the door, and concluded that insurance was a solution to a problem that couldn’t possibly happen, that word turned out to be the most expensive word they ever believed.

For those who had bought cover though, the market did exactly what it had promised. Claims settled, some within a month, quietly and without fuss.

No film for that. No Ross Kemp documentary with dramatic lighting. Just the quiet machinery of a market that had assumed the impossible was merely a trifle difficult, set the money aside, and was right.

Impregnable. Unsinkable. Foolproof. They are the most expensive words in the English language, and our market is professionally, constitutionally, almost pathologically unable to believe any of them. That isn’t cynicism. It’s the most useful instinct in this world – every risk we price before the disaster arrives, every question we ask that makes someone uncomfortable, every slip that gets written faster and more accurately because of what we build. It’s the same instinct, every time.

That’s what our market does. We look at the safest room in London and then we price the risk of a group of old blokes renting a drill from Machine Mart on Maundy Thursday.

Have a good week.

Rob

P.S. The fact that those intruders were all in their seventies? Just shows you the lack of effort and ambition present in our youth today.