HOWZAT

“It was on the basis of a half-hour meeting with Carol Galley and her team that we lost the company to a management that I didn’t have a great deal of respect for.”

There is unquestionably more red tape today in boardrooms. Sir Christopher sees most of the changes as “pretty sensible and necessary”, but considers America has taken things too far. In particular, he is critical of the Sarbanes- Oxley rules, which catch UK companies with a US presence. He says: “If we had the option, we would seriously consider delisting in America. We can’t do that. No form of corporate governance rules is proof against rotten apples. You ’ll see scandals like Enron and misfires like Vivendi happening in every decade.”

Sir Christopher believes that non-executive directors — the good, challenging ones — are the best insurance against corporate wrongdoing. “The real thing that needs to be changed is more astute and observant and energetic non-executive directors,” he says. “The best defence against a chairman who ‘goes mad’ is a strong slate of non-executive directors who can kick him out or stop him.”

Sir Christopher was born in 1938 in Yokohama, Japan. His father worked for Shell and the family shuttled between Canada, Jamaica and Kenya. Bland was sent to prep school in Ulster at eight and later to Sedbergh public school in Cumbria. He did National Service with the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards. At Oxford, he read history and captained the fencing and pentathlon teams.

Sir Christopher has a raft of extra-curricular activities. He has just become chairman of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in which challenges include finding a new London base. He is chairman and 70 per cent shareholder in Leith’s School of Food and Wine in Kensington. It runs courses and evening classes, and is popular with banks and institutions seeking an alternative to paintballing and go-karting.

He is senior adviser to Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm, and chairman of Canongate, a small Scottish publishing house run by his stepson.

Sir Christopher says that he could never have foreseen his career. “My business career has been quite unusual and non-linear and unpredicted and unplanned,” he says. “I’m not sure you can say to anybody, ‘here’s what you should do’.”

His first job was as an assistant advertising manager with Currys, the retailer. A stint on the Greater London Council led to the Independent Broadcasting Authority and to a wider career in broadcasting.

Business was one of the least fashionable choices of career among Oxbridge graduates in the early 1960s. “All my contemporaries at university wanted to go into the BBC or journalism or the Foreign Office or the law,” he says. “Business was absolutely the last resort.”

Contemporaries at Oxford included David Dimbleby and Melvyn Bragg. Those to pursue a business career included Jonathan Fry, later chairman of Burmah Castrol, and Christopher Hogg, who made his name at Courtaulds.

Sir Christopher fancied journalism, but was rejected by the BBC without even getting an interview. He then tried print. “The Irish Times similarly took a fairly unimpressed view of my journalistic qualifications — which were zero,” he says. “So I went into business by default. I was lucky.”

The conversation turns to Sir Christopher’s remote Scottish hideaway. There are no share price screens to watch, and there is no mobile phone coverage. “I’m really gone when I’m there,” Sir Christopher says. “It’s very beautiful, very wild. It’s rejuvenating.”

Yet technology is catching up. “The locals know me well enough to ask, ‘when’s Broadband coming?’. The answer is July 2005. So it’s coming. Even there.”

CV: SIR CHRISTOPHER BLAND

Name: Francis Christopher Buchan Bland

Born: May 29, 1938

Residence: London and Hampshire

Marital Status: Married 1981, Jenny May; one son, two stepsons, two stepdaughters

Education: Sedbergh; The Queen’s College, Oxford. 2nd Lieut, 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, 1956-58

Career: Deputy Chairman, Independent Broadcasting Authority, 1972-80. Chairman, LWT, 1984-94. Chairman, BBC, 1996-2001

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