THREE THOUSAND five hundred miles away, but big and bristly as ever, Allan
Leighton doesn’t mince his words.
“Look, Andrew, that’s how I have done it for the past three to four years, and
I’ve been pretty successful at it, and I am not the full-time leader of this
organisation, and actually I am a lot less plural than I was.”
I had asked him whether the Royal Mail deserved better than a chairman who was
working in Canada most of the time. Leighton, speaking from Toronto on
video-conference to me at Royal Mail’s headquarters in London’s Old Street,
barely bats an eyelid. He is a one-man whoosh of blokeish persuasion.
“I am there to support Adam Crozier and his team, and Adam is a first-class
chief executive. I have worked with some of the best and helped develop some
of the best in Britain and he is awesome, and we meet all the time, and it
doesn’t matter what people do, it’s whether they are good people, rather
than people who are there every day of their lives - there are lots of
people who will be there every day of their lives and do bugger all.”
It does seem odd, though, that Leighton, six years in the job as chairman of
the Royal Mail, is now working in Canada, where he is being paid C$1m
(£495,000) a year to help turn round its No 1 supermarket chain Loblaw,
owned by the Weston family.
Meanwhile, the Royal Mail is threatened again by strike action – this time
over reforms to its pension fund – and has been immersed in controversy for
months over plans to close a further 2,500 post offices. In the next month,
the review panel appointed by government to investigate the future of the
postal services market will make its first report.
Leighton may strictly be nonexecutive chairman at the Royal Mail, and the
government may have tried and failed recently to find a prominent
businessman to replace him, but in the past he has been a lot more visible
than Crozier. He has just signed on as chairman for another year. Shouldn’t
he be around some more?
He will be, he says, not least this week, when he is returning to celebrate
his 55th birthday and run the London Marathon, part of his one-man bid to
raise £1m for Breast Cancer Care, the charity to which he pledges all his
earnings from television, speeches and his recent book, On Leadership.
“And I want some sponsorship from you, Andrew. I did the marathon 25 years ago
and I want to run it at the same speed I did then. So this may be my
obituary - you have the honour to write it. Ha ha ha.”
Do you see how he did that? It’s hard to dislike Leighton, who can spin from
serious to funny in a wink, yet it’s also easy to see why some think he is
good at dodging the awkward questions.
Perhaps he has always been hard to pin down. As boss of supermarket chain Asda
he famously sold the business to Wal-Mart for £6.7 billion in 1999 and then
walked out in 2000, announcing he was going plural.
“Well, all I had been given was a clock and people asked ‘what are you doing
next?’ and I just said, ‘I am going plural’. Wish I hadn’t now.”
In truth, he has made a career out of it, advising Sir Philip Green at BHS,
Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox at Last-minute.com, inventor Sir James
Dyson, EMI buyer Guy Hands, Rupert and James Murdoch at BSkyB - part-owned
by News Corporation, parent company of The Sunday Times - retail magnate
Galen Weston and his son Galen Weston (G1 and G2, as he calls them) and more.
Leighton came close to going unplural last year, suggesting to Green that he
take BHS off his hands. That came to nothing, but he is still, he says,
having a blast. You can see as much from his stint advising contestants on
the television series Breaking Into Tesco on Channel 5.
Does he want to be a TV star? He laughs. “I wish I had 50 TV contracts in
front of me, but . . .” Sadly, he says, he hasn’t the looks.
Tall and palely lumpy, habitually dressed in pink shirt and pinstriped suit,
with balding head and stubble cropped to half an inch, Leighton is an
engaging catch for anyone with employees to inspire. He has always been
happiest chatting on the shop-floor - he even boasts that Forrest Gump is
his inspirational management text.
He particularly likes the bit where Forrest points out that it isn’t the
animals who write the No Feeding signs at the zoo. Really? Of course,
Leighton’s smarter than that.
Just ask him if he thinks he has done well at the Royal Mail. “Come on, the
business is in much better shape than it was. We’ve taken £12.5 billion and
50,000 people out of the organisation. We’ve gone from a very unprofitable
business, losing £1m a day, to a profitable business, with service levels
the best that’s ever been.
“And if you look at its two parcel businesses, Parcelforce in the UK used to
lose £200m a year. This year it will make north of £25m profit. And Royal
Mail’s European parcels arm, GLS, is probably the most successful,
fastest-growing parcels business in the world. Then there’s the investment
in auto-mation we are making.”
It doesn’t impress competitors, who want Royal Mail’s delivery operation split
off, or the regulator Postcomm, which recently said the Royal Mail spends
too much time keeping competitors out of the market. Or union chiefs who
still refer to Leighton and Crozier as “Laurel and Hardy” and remain
infuriated by Crozier’s £1m-a-year pay package - Leighton takes only £20,000
a year as nonexecutive chairman.
There have also been needling references to the money spent on plasma screens
for mail depots so Leighton can give, as The Sun puts it, “Big Brother-style
pep talks” to his colleagues.
Is his walkabout magic wearing off? Leighton, sitting in front of a poster of
the Rocky Mountains at Loblaw, shakes his head. The Royal Mail, he says, has
“the biggest pension fund deficit in the western world”, and had to do
something about it. There will be no strike, he predicts. “The last round
wore everyone out, and nothing changed, and nothing is going to change what
has been agreed over pensions.”
As for post office closures, he says that people miss the point. It is a
loss-making network, and they have to shrink it to get it out of the red.
It’s not about which outlet is profitable. By shutting a number, their
revenues are distributed round the others, which will then push the network
towards the black.
He is the last court of appeal for branch closures. Has he reprieved any? “A
couple,” he says. “But you know, it’s not a popularity contest here; it’s
about getting a job done.”
Does he want to drop the universal service obligation – getting a first-class
letter in Britain from anywhere to anywhere next day?
No, he says. “But it costs so much money we have to address it.” As for
Postcomm’s criticism: “That’s rubbish. Open the market, I don’t care who
comes in.”
That bullish determination has propelled him through a career that was forged
at Mars, and reached its apogee at Asda. Born in Hereford an only child to
retailing parents - his father managed a Coop - Leighton has always insisted
that business is nothing more than common sense.
At Asda, where he worked closely with Archie Norman and trained a clutch of
today’s top managers, he helped transform the ailing supermarket chain into
a dynamic, motivated operation. He also walked around wearing a Gumpish
badge that said Allan – Happy To Help, as did all his employees.
Sir Philip Green, who has worked closely with Leighton for the past decade,
describes him succinctly as “a great people man, a do-gooder”. He won’t,
however, say how close Leighton came to grabbing BHS last year.
Leighton is more forthcoming. “We only had a little conversation . . . but in
the end I couldn’t get out of some of my other commitments.” He adds that
raising money was not the issue, but he was also unsure that Green would
ever sell. “He loves that business.”
Could Leighton have revamped BHS - he wanted it to sell food again - and
stayed at the Royal Mail?
Unlikely, and his commitments to the Weston family already pay him well,
though others around him are frustrated that, with his talents, he hasn’t
plunged back into running something properly. What’s he got to show for
eight years of giving advice?
Working with amazing people, and it still goes on, he says: Guy Hands,
inventing a radically new model for a music business at EMI; the Westons,
running an array of retail interests from Loblaw to Selfridges; Prince
Charles, for whom he is now trying to reinvigorate the local economy in
Burnley.
Has he turned down a knighthood? “Speculation,” says Leighton. But living half
his life in Toronto, where he now has a house, has caused stresses. He
separated from his wife three years ago. He turns sharp when I ask if he has
a long-term girlfriend. Yes. “But no personal stuff, Andrew.”
Fair enough. In recompense, I want to show that I, too, am happy to help. He
has lost weight since Breaking Into Tesco was recorded, he is fighting fit,
he wants more sponsorship for the London Marathon and it is a great cause.
You can pledge money by e-mailing him at Allan.Leighton@Royalmail.co.uk
or by visiting his website www.onleadership.co.uk
and looking for the Breast Cancer Care link. Just don’t press ‘Book Allan’
or he may come round and give a speech.
ALLAN LEIGHTON’S WORKING DAY
THE Royal Mail chairman wakes at his Middlesex home at 5am, and goes for a
four-mile run. By 6.30, Allan Leighton is off on the Underground to his Bond
Street office.
“I will usually have some meetings there, or at Royal Mail’s HQ in Old Street.
It’s varied, I don’t have set days apart from board reports. I go where the
issues are.”
Leighton doesn’t do lunch - “I come from the Ken Morrison school of lunch:
cheese and onion crisps and a Kitkat” - and works till after 7pm. He keeps
the same routine in North America, where he spends half his time.
VITAL STATISTICS
Born:April 12, 1953
Marital status:married but separated; three children
School:Magdalen College School, Brackley
University:Oxford Polytechnic, Harvard
First job:Lloyds Bank cashier
Salary package:C$1m from Loblaw, C$1m from other Weston family
interests, £50,000 as director at BSkyB, £20,000 as chairman of Royal Mail,
others undisclosed
Home:Middlesex and Toronto
Car:not disclosed
Favourite book:Singapore Burning, by Colin Smith
Favourite music:Elbow
Favourite film:Forrest Gump
Favourite gadget:Blackberry
Last holiday:Florida
DOWNTIME
ALLAN LEIGHTON loves to relax by running. “I run and run and run, up to 20
miles a week. Recently I have been doing 17-mile runs to prepare for the
London Marathon.”
He is also a big sports fan, supporting Leeds football club - where he was
once deputy chairman - Leicester rugby, and Northants cricket. He now
supports the Toronto Maple Leaf ice-hockey team as well.
What does he spend his money on? “Not very much. I am not a great holidaygoer;
after four days I get bored. I can’t ski, my knees have gone, though I can
still run. I am very low maintenance really.”
