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Thursday 4 December 2008

The entrepreneur’s art: buying, building, selling

Judi Bevan meets David Young, who served in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet before chairing Cable & Wireless and creating his own successful private-equity business

But as an erstwhile Thatcherite, Young is naturally out of tune with most of this government’s other policies. The Northern Rock scandal appals him and he lays the blame firmly at the door of Gordon Brown and ‘this overcomplicated tripartite thing’ — the division of responsibility between the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the Treasury. ‘Under the old system nobody would have known about the problem. The Bank of England would have rung up one of the old joint-stock banks and offered them some help to take Northern Rock over.’

As a former member of Business for Sterling, which lobbied hard to keep Britain out of the euro, his line on Europe has hardened in the last five years. ‘At Business for Sterling we used to say there would be a £10 fine for anyone who said they wanted to leave Europe altogether, but now I believe we would have a much better relationship with Europe if we were part of the Free Trade Area.’ His view is that the continental Code Napoleon legal system is too different from Anglo-American common law to put the two together.

Although Young feels that Thatcherite policies did not pay enough attention to the disadvantaged, he applauds the change in social attitudes towards entrepreneurs that the era kick-started. He learned his first lessons in wealth creation as a protégé of the great entrepreneur Sir Isaac Wolfson — as indeed did Jeffrey Sterling. But when he left Wolfson’s Great Universal Stores to set up his own industrial property business, Eldonwall, in 1961, he hardly dared tell his friends because making money was deemed to be only marginally different to theft. Even in the 1980s he found it difficult to persuade graduates to work for themselves. ‘Nowadays you see and hear these bright, clever, ingenious people dreaming up new financial products, starting businesses, developing technology. The Conservatives gave people this wonderful opportunity to prosper.’

Young believes, by the way, that the next new, new thing to come from these kinds of individuals will be wireless-connected internet television, giving us any programme or film we want any time we want it. Doubtless he will be among the first to own one.

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