Watch out: Ratner's back

Gerald Ratner is neither a sophisticate nor an intellectual, as his approach to an old passion of his - Scrabble - reveals. "I haven't got the greatest vocabulary in the world," he tells me in what, for him, passes for an excited tone (he's a bit of an Eeyore, really - all sighs and frown lines). "But the game isn't about that! People do clever words and think they're going to get more points. Well, they're not. I once did the word "iceberg" but the important thing was, it landed on two triple scores! I'm always telling people about it. They come up to me and say: "You were the one who did 'iceberg'."

His attitude to the world of retail is, of course, very similar. He has never cared much about what he sells; his eye has always been on profit alone. In the Eighties, Gerald ran a vast empire which, though it included Watches of Switzerland and Ernest Jones, was best-known for the Ratners name - a chain of high-street shops selling jewellery (and - oh dear - fake antique books) that was as cheap as chips.

These shops made him rich and not a little cocky. He had his very own Sikorsky helicopter, a £1.6 million Thames-side mansion and a £600,000-a-year salary. Life was one great big triple-word score.

Then, on 23 April 1991, he made a boo-boo and life changed forever. In a speech to businessmen, he described a Ratners sherry decanter (plus six glasses - yours for £4.95) as "total crap" and joked that a pair of the company's 99p earrings cost "about the same as a Marks and Spencer prawn sandwich, and probably wouldn't last as long".

Thereafter, the group's fortunes went into free fall; its name was changed from Ratners to Signet and, in November 1992, Gerald resigned. He went on to open a luxury health club in Henley-on-Thames, which he recently sold for £3.7 million.

In the flesh, Ratner looks a bit like Mr Bean and a lot like the gloomy singer Leonard Cohen. He is tanned and wearing an expensive-looking suit but, even so, he seems a shadow of his former self. His hands shake a little and his manner is hesitant, even puzzled. He is here, in the offices of a financial PR company, to tell me about Ratners-Online, an internet venture which, from September, will sell brand-name watches at discount prices. If this is a success - and he thinks it will be - he plans to expand into jewellery. Yes, amazing as it might sound, he will soon be back in the bangle business.

"One minute the Ratners name was highly regarded and I was proud of it," he says. "The next, it was in the mire. So, from my family's point of view, it would be nice to get it back up there. The only way to bury this story (the prawn sandwich debacle) once and for all is for me to be successful, and to do it in jewellery." But it's a challenge, persuading people to invest in his new business.

"We have to raise £4.5 million. It's difficult: people have a huge resistance to dotcoms. During the dotcom boom a lot of cowboys went into the trade." Unlike him, he says, they didn't know how to run a company.

The past decade has taught Ratner a lot; he is, he insists, a different person from the man he used to be. "It was the Eighties. You thought you could do anything. You didn't really appreciate what came your way. There were lots of material things that I didn't get any pleasure out of at all. I used to buy a camera or something, look at it for a few minutes, then put it in the corner."

After his fall from grace, he no longer had a driver to ferry him. "But I'm happy to drive myself ! I like looking for the meter, filling up the car. Honestly. When I first left Ratners, I went to the petrol station and I ended up squirting the stuff in the air. I didn't even know how to fill the car up.

"You become completely pathetic when you're successful because everything is delegated. But the truth is, you're never happy with what someone else does. With a driver, you can't listen to music, or put it on very loudly, and you feel inhibited about your phone calls. But if you're on your own in the car ..." His voice ebbs away to nothing as he gazes into the middle distance (presumably he is imagining himself cruising the Berkshire byways in his Mercedes S500).

Running the health club did not keep him sufficiently busy - so he would cycle the 25 miles there from his 12-bedroom home in Bray to give himself more of a challenge. As a result, he is very fit and better acquainted than he might otherwise have been with his two youngest children, Jonathan, 11, and Sarah, 13 (by his second wife, Moira, his former secretary, for whom Ratner left his first wife, Angela, after 15 years; he and Angela have two grown-up daughters). Did he get under his wife's feet during this period?

"Yes. To make a marriage work, you can't spend too much time together. But I became a better father. When your business disappears, that's what happens. As someone once said, if you're a great violinist, you're a terrible lover."

Ratner, however, appears to be adept at skating on thin ice. There were rumours that he was having an affair, first in 1994, and then in 1998 when he was photographed drinking champagne with a blonde, married mother-of-three called Lucy Griffiths, whom he met at his health club.

Ratner joined the family business when he was 21 (he was expelled from Hendon Grammar School at 16 after suggesting to the ageing headmaster at a colleague's funeral that he might as well stay at the crematorium) as a humble shop assistant. "I don't think I changed," he says. "Not like Ralph Halpern (the Burton's boss) who became a different person as soon as he was successful. I knew where I came from."

Will he try to instil a sense of the value of graft into his children? "If they don't want Saturday jobs, they don't have to have them. But I'm not going to give them lots of money. They get an allowance - £25 a month. If they want more, they'll have to earn it."

These days, in most ways his life is the opposite of flashy. He used to have trouble sleeping, so he cut out coffee and only drinks alcohol at the weekend. Is this because he fears making another public relations gaffe? Doesn't he find himself longing for the days when he could be unguarded? "No." A long pause. "I did live life on the edge. Someone once said they wouldn't like to drive along the edge of a cliff with me. I wouldn't say I had a death wish, but I had no fear. I used to refuse a pension in the old days. I'd say: "Don't talk to me about pensions! But the fearlessness has been knocked out of me."

And, alas, the rude jokes follow him wherever he goes - even, it seems, into the offices of the big banks. "I said to this guy that someone had been very off with me lately. He said: 'Perhaps she bought some of your jewellery.' Not a day goes by without a crack like that. Even in the City you get the occasional joke, because they find it so funny." He produces a list of all the potential investors he will meet this week. "We've had a fantastic response in terms of appointments, but whether that's down to curiosity, I don't know."

But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Ratner is confident that, in five years' time, he will once again have more than his fair share of the jewellery market. "I've never understood why there's this snob thing with jewellery." he says. "The other day, a rather attractive analyst told me she'd been skiing in Courchevel and that no one was wearing jewellery any more. Well, that's rubbish! It's not about what people are wearing at Courchevel. It's about what people are wearing in Barnsley, not Bond Street."