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Thursday 20 November 2008

Facing the flak at Terminal 5

Judi Bevan meets BAA chairman Sir Nigel Rudd, an Eighties entrepreneur turned City grandee who still relishes tough challenges — and has met several at Heathrow

‘The international airlines will not go to Stansted or Gatwick,’ retorts Rudd. ‘Continental Airlines have just paid £100 million for two pairs of slots at Heathrow because it’s the hub; it works for people who want to spend a couple of days in London and business people in transit.’ He claims, intriguingly, that Heathrow is already losing out to Dubai airport, which has been created as a hub for the Far East. ‘Passengers can bypass Heathrow. It’s a disaster for London.’

Rudd was one of 11 ‘New Tycoons’ featured in a book of the same name that I co-authored in 1989, charting the rise of the young entrepreneurs of the 1980s. Of the original players, only Rudd and Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP are still at the top of their game. Both are cool under fire and dispassionate when it comes to making tough calls. While Sorrell has continued to build WPP, Rudd took the hard decision to demerge Williams in 2000. ‘It would have been lovely to stay there with all my friends but we realised that the age of the conglomerate was dead.’

When he arrives at a new company, the chief executive had better watch out. It took him six months at BAA to bid farewell to Stephen Nelson, Matthews’s predecessor. So just how many has he fired? ‘It is not a question of scalps,’ he says defensively. ‘Only one of the seven chief executives I have removed was truly incompetent. The others were just not good enough. It is a mistake to persevere with someone when you can get better.’ He considers his greatest strength to be his judgment of people. ‘I am very rarely wrong and I make my judgment within the first five minutes of meeting someone.’

Rudd grew up in modest circumstances as the second son of a Derbyshire weights-and-measures inspector who was 50 when Nigel was born. He remembers an upbringing of genteel poverty. Painfully shy as a child, he developed finely tuned antennae for reading others. He entered Bemrose grammar school in the bottom stream before putting on an intellectual spurt and taking his O-levels a year early. The experience gave him a lifelong regard for grammar schools. ‘I went to school with all sorts of boys but even if you were from the worst council estate in Derby, from the moment you got on the bus you were in an academic environment where people encouraged and valued you.’

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