While Margaret Thatcher’s remark at a meeting with the British Railways Board that ‘if you were any good you wouldn’t be here’ remains apocryphal, when she was, briefly, Shadow Minister of Transport in 1969, she certainly told the board ‘There’s only one worthwhile member of your board, Mr Jones’. That was Sydney Jones, the creator of British Rail Research and father of the Advanced Passenger Train.
That meeting had got off to a rocky start when, seeing some potential topics for discussion on a blackboard, she exclaimed ‘You people can’t think on your feet. You can’t work out what you want, can you?’
Just under a decade later, now leader of the opposition, she again had lunch with the board. Then Chairman Sir Peter Parker, one of this column’s tutelary heroes, recalled in his inimitable prose: ‘She had talked to us about privatisation with a hearty dismaying adamancy: to be nationalised, she explained, was an industry’s admission of failure’.
BUSINESS-LED
However, in the 1980s, under Chairman Bob Reid’s leadership, British Rail had worked out what it wanted to do. Sir Bob had a good relationship with Mrs Thatcher and her Transport Secretary who, broadly, let him get on with creating his ‘business-led …
