David Young

As London’s mayor, Sir Alan, you’d be a mere apprentice A recent poll placed Sir Alan Sugar as the leading independent candidate to be the next mayor of London. His statement that ‘...observing the past mayor, Livingstone, and Boris, the current one, I’m confident that it would be a walk in the park for me’, tempted me, just for a moment, to wish him success — until I realised the likely effect on London. Why is it that so many successful businessmen think government is a part-time job and something they can handle with ease? Is that why so few have succeeded? It is for others to say whether or not I succeeded in government: at least I was able to choose the time of my own departure without the press hounding me out.

It all started at one of the Prime Minister’s monthly press conferences. Suddenly, in answer to a question, Gordon Brown named Sir Fred Goodwin, the now notorious former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, as the man who broke the bank. After the conference the press machine of Number 10 must have gone into action, for the next morning’s papers were full of pictures and stories of Fred, naming and shaming him as the father of the credit crunch. The publicity machine continued remorselessly day after day, as time went by and he and the other hapless chairmen and chief executives of failed banks were hauled before Commons committees to make abject apologies. It was a circus not seen since the days of the Soviet show trials.

‘The President tells me that too much regulation is harming business,’ Margaret Thatcher said, the moment I walked into her office for my weekly meeting. I had been appointed minister without portfolio some months earlier and the Prime Minister had just returned overnight from her latest summit with Ronald Reagan. ‘You had better believe it,’ was my somewhat flippant reply — and for my pains I found myself minutes later with my own cabinet sub-committee on deregulation. This was the beginning of years of deregulation efforts by successive governments, which gradually faded until today, when all that remains is in the name of the department for ‘Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform’, which replaced the DTI.

David Young, who later served in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet and as chairman of Cable & Wireless, recalls his struggle for survival as an up-and-coming entrepreneur There are some days you just never forget. It was Monday morning, 12 November 1973, and I was in my office at Town & City Properties in Carlton Gardens. I was a main board director and a substantial shareholder, having sold my company, Eldonwall, to Town & City some three years before. Those years had brought about a remarkable property boom. We were already the second largest property company on the London stock exchange — but I think Barry East, the founder and chairman, wanted to be number one.