Neil buys PFD for £4m in ‘wrecking sale’

Andrew Neil, former editor of the Sunday Times, has bought the troubled London literary and talent agency Peter Fraser Dunlop. Along with a consortium of City investors, Neil paid £4m for company, which in the past year has seen many of its agents and more importantly their clients, among them Nick Hornby, Sir Tom Stoppard and Ricky Gervais, defect to rival agencies.

In one sense Neil can be seen to have got a bargain: he and his friends brought PFD off the Stellar Group, the US sports event group who paid £12m for the agency in 2001. However, since then 23 of it top agents and their clients have left. This followed a failed £4m management buy out led by Pat Kavanagh, 71, the agency's doyenne and wife of the novelist Julian Barnes. Aggrieved by Stellar's rejection, she and the other agents went on to form a rival agency, United Agents.

And while PFD still receives an estimated £3m from its backlist, it seems that that may be at risk. The Evening Standard reports that three of PFD's former authors – Julian Barnes, Joanna Trollope and Nick Hornby – have sought legal advice over a series of issues, including whether they can transfer their backlists to UA. If this was successful, it would seriously damage the profitability of the company.

It appears that in buying the company, Neil has apparently dashed the hopes held by Kavanagh and Co that PFD would eventually crumble and that they would pick up the highly lucrative pieces. Says a source: "What is really stupid about this is it is a wrecking sale. It is really like cutting a person in half and asking both parties to walk away separately."

Meanwhile, Neil, who is the chief executive of the Spectator, seems oblivious to all this. "If you were an asset-stripper you would be prepared to pay this price to close the company down and live off its back book." Caroline Michel, who defected from William Morris last September to take control of PFD, will continue to run the agency. Model Twiggy, now the face of M&S, and historian Simon Schama are among the talent who remains on her books, at least for now.