HOWZAT

Lovell, a Hampshire farmer’s son, doesn’t bristle as he is questioned. He has been through worse — his house was picketed and his family threatened by eco-protestors when Costain built the Newbury bypass — and he clearly loves digging in for the challenge.

And perhaps he likes confounding preconceptions, too. With his lean frame, nasal accent and shaggy, side-parted hair, he retains a boyish edge which is not quite what you expect from a former Price Waterhouse trainee. Very bright and very sporty — real tennis buff, Oxford blue, classics first — Lovell also has a vibrant confidence just the right side of conceit.

Colleagues say that has been key to morale. “It helped to take staff, board and lenders through the dark days,” says Peter Collini, managing director of Gazelle, Jarvis’s financial adviser.

Lovell says he gets that and more from his mother, who played tennis at county level. “Professional attitude, diligence and ambition, I guess,” he says, when I ask what he inherited. He was also an only child.

“My dad was 50 and my mum 40 when I was born, and a feature of them being older than some was that they had finished with their own ambitions and fed a lot of that into me.”

This ambition was piqued when the banks lured him into Jarvis to oversee the most complex financial restructuring of recent years. He admits it was probably “madness” to take it on and that he accepted the formal offer — from Jarvis chairman Steve Norris, over breakfast at the Ritz — “without proper due diligence”.

But he had turned round Costain, and more recently Dunlop Slazenger — sold to Sportsworld International boss Mike Ashley last February — and he had the confidence of the money men. He had caught their eye a decade before, sorting out problems at a subsidiary of steelwork contractor Conder.

The banks pulled the plug there, but they also parachuted him into Costain. “That immediate vote of confidence meant a lot.” He has been proving himself ever since — cutting jobs, closing plants, refinancing and rebuilding from scratch.

His style is to be open and frank. “If you give people a fair view of what’s going on, they will respect that.”

Those who pulled him into Jarvis say he is unique in having both experience of intricate debt solutions and commercial awareness. “That’s an uncommon mix in the restructuring arena,” says Paul Baines, managing partner at the finance firm Hawkpoint.

Lovell’s reward at Jarvis is good pay and healthy bonuses for targets hit — £450,000 for securing refinancing of the PFI contracts and an extension of banking facilities.

But if he can keep the core businesses working well, it will have been money well spent. The Jarvis name? It may have to change, he admits. “It depends how the Potters Bar inquiry comes out.” But at the moment it’s not a priority.

“We must do something about the balance sheet,” he says. “If there isn’t a trade sale, there will be some element of debt/equity swap, I hope with the involvement of another strategic investor, be it an industrial player or financial investor. The ideal would be an overseas industrial player looking to get a stake in a British company.”

And then he will pack his bag and leave, returning to the portfolio career he was trying to develop when Jarvis intervened. There’s a sports business his cousin is developing, and a cancer-care centre that he wants to be involved in, and the mid-Hampshire NHS primary care trust of which he is vice- chairman. They must have raised an eyebrow when he went into Jarvis. He laughs. “Lots of jaws dropped, but for different reasons.”

Or he could happily do with time off to continue planting up woodland he is developing near his Winchester home. He adds that his wife, Virginia, daughter of Bernard Wetherill, the former speaker of the House of Commons, is deputy lieutenant of Hampshire, no less. “President of Hampshire St John’s Ambulance, deputy chairman of her bench, etcetera.”

But if another company patient presents itself? “Oh, I'll probably find it very tempting,” he shrugs, as if it’s pointless to resist the inevitable.

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