Modern Communications

When I left school, my ambition was to be a lawyer. I had read law at University, but then after being called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn, I realised a career in the law was not for me, even though I love the law and think that studying law is incredibly useful training. One of the reasons lawyers end up in leadership roles is because they learn how to communicate, how to read a document and paraphrase it; they are also taught how to write well, which are all useful skills. After deciding not to become a lawyer, I spent two years at the London Business School in Regent’s Park, where I had the most stimulating time studying, before going to work in the City.

Your educational experiences have given you some very firm ideas about university education, haven’t they?

Yes, the two years I spent studying for an MBA, in terms of what we packed into business school, including work experience in the holidays, made me realise that university should be two years not three or four. If you really apply yourself, you can accomplish the work in a far shorter space of time. If, for example, undergraduate degrees were just two years, it would save the public exchequer a lot of money, students wouldn’t get into such debt and it would be less strain on parents. Anyway, after business school I went into corporate finance in the City. But I didn’t like the mid 70s City – back, then, there was a really chauvinist atmosphere and I found it offensive how women were treated; and so I ended up joining the family property and investment business which had aspirations to get into other fields. My elder brother ran the property side, and so I cut my teeth in hospitality and travel. We took the business into restaurants, the wine business and parking. One of my first enterprises was Drakes Restaurant in Pont Place which we called the ‘English Restaurant in Chelsea’. At the beginning I was the manager, my wife, Joy, worked with me for a while, and although it was hard, it was amongst the most rewarding customer facing work I have done, other than disc jockeying which I did to pay my way through University! A Disc Jockey can make or break a party and it is the same in the restaurant business. You can make or break a customer’s evening in terms of how you deliver the service. There are very few customer experiences where they are entirely dependent on you but the restaurant business is one of them.

Is that the only involvement you have had with the restaurant industry?

No, when we sold Drakes in the late 1980s, I got involved in 190 Queen’s Gate – with Antony Worrall Thompson, Richard Shepherd of Langan’s Brasserie and Roy Ackerman. I had also been very active on the Restaurant Association with Roy and Robert Carrier – who, you may remember, developed wipe-clean recipe cards – and also with Pru Leith. On a particularly memorable day, we marched down the street in white aprons to 10 Downing Street to demand an end to the old licensing laws, which had meant that after ‘last orders’ at lunchtime you could not be served a drink in a restaurant until it opened again in the evening. Imagine how it was in those days for tourists, when, after a morning’s sightseeing, they sat down for a late lunch and weren’t able to have a drink with their meal?!

That was a landmark change. How exactly did it come about?

We introduced a Private Members Bill in the Lords, sponsored by Viscount Montgomery, who was a good friend of the restaurant industry. He argued that liberalizing the licensing laws would have a beneficial impact on both tourism and employment. Not only did it transform the ability for restaurants to be able to stay open, but it also transformed the lives of waiters and waitresses who previously could only be offered work on unsocial split shift hours. It was really quite an achievement, because Private Members Bills don’t often get through. To get it through the Commons, we had to wait until a particular ‘teetotal’ MP was away for the day and then Robert Banks MP managed to get the bill got through in one sitting. Without our Bill having got through, I am quite sure that the reform of pub licensing hours would not have taken place in 2003.

Tell me about The Springboard Charity which you founded in 1990 and of which you are still Chairman?

When I was working with the Restaurant Association (I am still Vice-President), I got involved in trying to get more home grown kids working in the hospitality sector and so I helped to set up Springboard. We started off in Tin Pan Alley, with help from Lord Forte, with a team going into schools and promoting opportunities in tourism and leisure. There is still a reticence on the part of Mums and Dads to consider jobs in this industry as a permanent career for their children but the introduction of the minimum wage has helped as well as flexible licensing hours. Springboard now employs 40 staff across the UK and we have definitely had an impact. But the challenge continues as there is still a shortage of chefs in the UK despite all the TV exposure for chefs (which has been helpful at one level in terms of showing young people that it is a glamorous and a real profession but it also shows that it is a tough life). So one of the things that Springboard does is to run a competition for 12 to 16 years olds called FutureChef – last year we had almost 8,000 kids cooking across the UK and the standard was extraordinary. Winners tend to be 14 or 15 years old and they then have the potential to get very serious roles in the industry, cooking, for example, at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants or at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons. Bringing vocational qualifications into schools in a serious way will take some time, because a lot of people are still dumming it down as being a second class qualification; but there are kids who are hugely talented but not suited to academic work, who could be stars in hospitality. It can also do wonders for UK plc’s productivity and job creation.

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