JUST a day after saying an emotional goodbye to Marks & Spencer, Paul Myners is still struggling to explain what happened.
“It’s not of my nature to say things that don’t reflect my feelings,” says the former M&S chairman. “And my feelings are very sad.”
Then he smiles. “But you are bound to ask me in the course of this ‘what happens next?’ and there are some very interesting opportunities...”
And so he moves on, rarely looking back. Myners, 58, the City boss who helped defend M&S from takeover by Sir Philip Green, is always searching for “other ways” of doing things.
It has been the mainstay of a working life that has included teaching and journalism, investment banking, fund management and, latterly, chairing the iconic British retailer.
Yet it seems extraordinary to many that, when nearly everyone at M&S wanted him to stay, he should voluntarily pick up his bags and walk.
“It would have been too damaging to the company for this to continue,” he says, referring to his stand-off with fellow director Kevin Lomax over whether he was too close to M&S chief executive Stuart Rose.
“Even though it was clear I had the support of the executive team, it was sensible that a compromise was reached.”
So Myners stood down at the annual meeting last Tuesday, to be replaced by Lord Burns. Lomax will leave the board in September to spend more time at his technology company Misys. And Rose will continue plotting M&S’s recovery without the man who hired him.
Couldn’t Myners have just stamped his foot and said: I’m staying? He shakes his head. “I had said I would only be chairman for the period of the bids.
I did not become chairman through the conventional process. I felt colleagues should have an opportunity to choose and that’s when Lomax objected.”
Did Lomax want the chairmanship himself? Myners shrugs and then goes off the record.
Burly and crop-haired, Myners is not quite what you expect from an FTSE chairman. Wearing a black suit and rumpled white shirt open at the neck, he has a knobbly heftiness that suggests he might just have come in from working on the Tarmac.
In fact, he cut his City teeth at NM Rothschild, then made a £30m fortune running the fund manager Gartmore for 15 years, before reinventing himself at 50: new marriage, new dress code (no ties) new life as a plural director, and an avid collector of contemporary art.
Driving him is a complex bundle of motivations that you can trace to his unusual beginnings. He was given away at birth, and spent three years in a children’s home in Bath before being adopted by a Cornish butcher and his hairdresser wife.
Their Methodist values, and a determination to make a difference, push him forward. Add in the fact that he has never wanted to know who his real parents were, and you can see Myners is good at moving on.
And he has enough on his plate anyway. Even without M&S, Myners still chairs the Guardian Media Group (GMG), the Low Pay Commission, the trustees of the Tate Gallery, the Ermitage hedge fund and the Aspen reinsurance company.
He sits as a member of the Court at the Bank of England, a director of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, a trustee of Glyndebourne, a director of the Bank of New York, a trustee of the left-of-centre thinktank Smith Institute and more. He has also written a series of reports on City workings for government.
No wonder Rose laughs at the idea that they were too close. “Just getting to see Paul was a major logistical exercise,” says Rose.
So, now Myners has a taste for it, is he looking for another high-profile FTSE slot? He laughs nervously. “I don’t go through the morning thinking I have got to have more chairmanships. But it’s important to me to have a wide range of activities, so I am not going to rule anything in or out.”
Nicely hedged. Myners nods with humour and tucks into a plate of sliced fruit that he has just unwrapped. We are sharing a sandwich lunch round the back of Tate Modern, one of his many ports of call. A better venue for photos, he thought.
That rational but unstuffy style defines his approach. Numerate, relentless and impatient of waffle, the affable Myners is also curiously hard to place — no accent, few mannerisms. Colleagues say he enjoys defying expectations.
“I think because Paul is classless he is seen to be accessible by people from a wide range of backgrounds,” says Sir Howard Davies, a fellow Tate trustee, “and he has a very sure touch.”
That sure touch, combined with his investment knowhow, was vital as he masterminded M&S’s defence against Green’s takeover attempts in 2004. Rose describes Myners as driven by a moral zeal.
In truth, Myners had already been agitating for change at M&S as a non-executive, and the Green bid gave him the chance to drive that through, bringing in Rose. Green made mistakes, too, says Myners.
“He failed to remove Stuart from the game, he underestimated the resilience of the M&S board, his first bid was too complicated and he mishandled the public relations, which meant that he lost potential support from private shareholders, who at M&S own the highest percentage of any FTSE company’s share capital. They were unflinching in their loyalty.”
Myners’ sure touch didn’t, however, stretch to appeasing Lomax, who felt the chairman would be more effective if less indebted to his chief executive.
Anyway, Myners has other fish to fry now. At GMG, he has overseen a review of strategy that will lead to the float next year of its Trader Media Group. That will raise funds for further investment in The Guardian and Observer. Can he make The Observer profitable? “The Observer is now losing only a modest amount of money, and its share of the quality Sunday market is growing. There is a huge elephant in the quality Sunday sector called The Sunday Times and that is why everyone else in the sector loses money.”
Yet isn’t he impatient for more change? Not always, he says, sometimes it pays to move carefully.
And that frenetic diary, dashing between countless directorships and homes in London, Berkshire and Cornwall. Does he need to feel needed? “Interesting,” he says, then blushes. Later he says he turns away a lot of directorships, especially if they involve wearing a tie.
Is he looking for something beyond business? Well, he has given up alcohol because it interfered with finding “a spiritual dimension” to his life. “I’ve always had that strong Wesleyan Methodist feeling, I don’t even like taking medicine.”
But he does like eating, judging by the way he is now tucking into those sandwiches. “Hey, I’m eating one and a half sandwiches and you’re going to say ‘grotesque and overweight, Myners gorges himself...’”
Two days later he e-mails me excitedly to say that Green dropped in to his M&S retirement dinner at Harry’s Bar. All mates now, it seems, and that’s how Myners likes it.
Born: April 1, 1948
Marital status: married twice, with five children
School: Truro
University: Institute of Education, University of London
First job: teacher
Salary: over £300,000
Homes: Westminster, Berkshire, Cornwall
Car: ‘I don’t have a car’
Favourite book: Barchester Chronicles, by Anthony Trollope
Favourite music: Philip Glass, a composer of operas, symphonies and film scores
Favourite film: Hotel du Lac
Favourite gadget: Rexel electronic stapler
Last holiday: safari in South Africa
Downtime
PAUL MYNERS spends his money on contemporary art.
He recently bought a video work by Bill Viola. He also has a collection of pictures by the St Ives group of painters. He keeps it at his home in Cornwall.
“At weekends my wife and I visit galleries,” says Myners, “but mostly we just spend time with the children. We have a busy and frenetic life during the week and our weekends are for relationships and each other and to recharge.”
He relaxes by reading or listening to jazz. “Having worked in journalism” — he was a financial writer on The Daily Telegraph between teaching and joining NM Rothschild — “I’m always drawn to newspapers and magazines. I just like to sit in the garden by the pool and read. Or help the kids with their homework.” He has two children, aged eight and ten, by his second marriage, and three by his first.
Paul Myners' working day
THE former Marks & Spencer chairman wakes at his home in Westminster at 6am. “There’s no average day, that’s the joy of a plural life,” says Paul Myners. “I do nothing that I don’t enjoy doing.”
Most days he checks in at his private office at the Michelin building in Chelsea. Then he will visit one of the countless organisations where he holds directorships. If he is chairing a board, he rarely lets meetings run over two hours — he never allows presentations or the use of Powerpoint. “They distract from discussion and dialogue.”
He prefers meeting contacts in cafés and is often seen smoking cigars outside the Michelin building’s coffee shop. Otherwise he entertains at the George club in Mayfair. Most evenings he will attend art events with his wife, Alison, who chairs the Contemporary Art Society.
