Judi Bevan

Corporate titan turned London healthcare chief Sir Richard Sykes faces his toughest challenge yet, says Judi Bevan — but he’s full of praise for the handling of swine flu Sir Richard Sykes darts across the hallway of the Athenaeum club to greet me. Lightly tanned, thin as a whippet, the former head of GlaxoSmithKline and Imperial College cuts a dash in pinstripes and a tie the colour of crushed raspberries. Sykes is to ‘change czars’ what Roger Federer is to tennis. In both his former roles he radically changed the institutions he headed. Through the takeover of Wellcome, followed by merger with SmithKline Beecham, he transformed middleweight Glaxo into GlaxoSmithKline, the third largest pharmaceutical group in the world.

Judi Bevan meets Sir John Parker, who chairs National Grid and the Court of the Bank of England — and takes an optimistic view of the deepening recession Few people would have dared to walk out of lunch at the Savoy Grill leaving behind the irascible Lord King. Sir John Parker, the softly spoken Irish charmer who now chairs National Grid, did just that. When he took over as chief executive at the ailing engineering firm Babcock & Wilcox in 1993, he first had to deal with the late John King, then chairman, who believed he should still call the shots despite the decline of the company under his command. ‘We had a real dust-up and I left the lunch early,’ explains Parker.

Judi Bevan hears the views of Paul Myners, the left-leaning millionaire art collector who has just become Gordon Brown’s City minister There is a telling mischief about the way the new City minister dresses. A double-breasted dove-grey pinstripe suit is worn with a white shirt worthy of a detergent ad, no tie but tasteful cuff links, black brogues and socks. There is an arresting slash of colour from a chunky orange plastic watch strap for his black Calvin Klein timepiece. All very Mondrian — but then until his appointment last week, Paul Myners, soon to be Lord Myners, was the chairman of the Tate trustees. He is such a keen collector of contemporary art that his Belgravia house does not just have paintings on the walls, it has installations.

Judi Bevan finds her local Lidl discount store full of bargains — but not Boden-clad middle-class shoppers Intrigued by reports that the middle classes are shopping at the German discount stores Aldi and Lidl — and even stuffing their purchases in Waitrose bags — I set off to track them down. My nearest Lidl is a couple of miles from my house at the northern end of Cricklewood Broadway — not exactly an area known for yummy-mummy sightings, and without a Starbucks or Caffè Nero for miles. Yet the statistics say that sales at both Aldi and Lidl have been growing strongly since householders have been hit by higher petrol and utility bills.

Tim Parker, the bubble-haired venture capitalist hired to cut costs at City Hall and make Mayor Boris’s vision a reality, strolls down the curved walkway to greet me smiling widely, just like his photographs. Tall and rangy, this socialist-turned-capitalist, who is to be paid just £1 a year, is all charm and apologies for failing to turn up for our appointment the day before. He takes responsibility like a good leader should, although I suspect the serried ranks of apparatchiks from the not-so-ancien régime of attempted sabotage. They should watch out: while turning round the AA, Parker earned the sobriquet ‘Prince of Darkness’ for his skill at excising surplus staff.

Judi Bevan meets BAA chairman Sir Nigel Rudd, an Eighties entrepreneur turned City grandee who still relishes tough challenges — and has met several at Heathrow Sir Nigel Rudd, chairman of BAA and motor group Pendragon and deputy chairman of Barclays Bank, has a reputation for riding towards the sound of gunfire. ‘I like difficult challenges — if it’s not difficult, where’s the fun?’ he says, an impish grin lighting up his solemn face. Not that the opening of Terminal 5 can have been a bundle of laughs amid the public uproar over cancelled flights and mountains of lost luggage. ‘The first few days were a tragedy,’ says Rudd, who admits that BAA must take the blame for some of the equipment not working properly.

In his measured, softly spoken way, Sir Michael Bishop is furious with the Conservative party for its plans to ration air travel. ‘There are few things less edifying than watching politicians jumping on a passing bandwagon,’ says the proprietor chairman of BMI British Midland, which holds the second largest number of take-off and landing slots at London Heathrow. Bishop is a Conservative and he sees proposals by David Cameron and George Osborne to curb air travel through punitive taxation as betrayal. ‘I felt it was a crass and clumsy response and against all Conservative principles,’ he says. Bishop is the quietly flamboyant elder statesman of the British airline industry; gracious, but with the self-contained air so often found in only children.

Those who fear that private-equity bidders, if they secure control, will destroy national icons such as Boots and Sainsbury’s, might consider that J. Sainsbury fared pretty well as a private company for 104 years before it floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1973. Family control with its paternalistic overtones may appear different from highly incentivised professional management backed by private equity, but in both cases the people at the top are motivated by the same goal. To make money for the com-pany is to make money for themselves. Private ownership enables managers to get on with this task without interference from the battalions of busybodies who besiege public companies.