“It’s a much more structured relationship than an outsider might think.” And it is not simply that the company and ad agency become enmeshed, with the agency staff forging personal relationships and learning where the bodies are buried “There are only 14 multinational agencies. “Their philosophy was to make people feel that they enjoyed running their business more with the Saatchis around,” said one ex-employee. “They advised on much more than advertising – staff motivation, training, takeover bids, mergers, acquisitions, internal communications.”The result is that nowadays it is not easy for a big multinational simply to move its account elsewhere. “It’s tricky to move a big piece of business,” said one top ad-man. “There there is a debt of gratitude built on a relationship goes that back to 1982 and the privatisation.”That debt owes a lot to the way the Saatchis changed the face of advertising. Mars, insiders say, has already taken the decision to remove its $400m account – not out of loyalty to Maurice but for straightforward business reasons “But BA is a different story,” said one industry observer.

“Are we to believe that a Chicago-based institution owning less than 10 per cent of the company’s stock isable to dominate board policy in the United Kingdom?” he asked.The intervention reflects something of the difference between ad agencies in the US, where the interests of shareholders have been largely preferred to those of clients, and those in the UK where, under the Saatchi influence, the opposite has obtained. Yesterday Lord King, the BA president, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, proclaimed that the row raised important issues of corporate governance. Two of its blue chip clients, British Airways and Mars have not simply threatened to withdraw their business; they have entered the fray. Saatchi fell loudly upon his sword.”It is clear that Maurice – and behind him the brooding saturnine presence of his brother Charles – feels that Herro made a mistake and he must be made to pay,” said Fallon.Herro and Co were already annoyed that investors who bought at £50 a share seven years earlier had seen the value of their investment fall to a mere £2 in recent times. The final straw was the attempt by the chairman to negotiate an option deal that could have netted him £5m in bonuses.The debacle has revealed a growing tension between the shareholders and the customers the agency is there to serve.

He, in alliance with Scott, forced the resignation of Maurice by threatening to call an extraordinary general meeting at which, the Saatchis’ financial advisers calculated after a straw poll of investors, they would lose. Two years ago they announced the biggest losses ever made in advertising Yet until recently it seemed the brothers had cheated fate. A new chief executive, Charlie Scott, was brought in to rescue the tatteredfinances. Over the past two years he has succeeded in rebuilding profits. But he also engaged in an increasingly public series of battles with Maurice Saatchi, after Charles had retired into the background, which culminated in the present terminal struggle.The other main player in the battle is David Herro, the 34-year-old fund manager for Harris Associates in Chicago, which owns 10 per cent of Saatchi’s shares. Others verged on the ludicrous, like their plan to take over the Midland Bank, which the Bank of England could never have approved.In this vaulting ambition lay their nemesis. Mrs T had an enormous impact on the nation’s businessmen – if the Saatchis were good enough for her …”But there was hubris at the heart of it all.