Coping with crisis, climate change — and lost luggage

Martin Broughton looks so lean and fit for someone of 60 that I worry he is playing too much golf. But no, his handicap is still only 17, a long way from the single digits that signal too much time teeing off and not enough pressing the flesh on behalf of British Airways and the Confederation of British Industry.

Nattily dressed in a sky-blue check shirt with white collar and cuffs and a sunshine- yellow tie, Broughton’s attire owes something to the Turf, another great passion. He owns ten race horses, three of them in partnership with Lazard’s Nicholas Jones, who advised Broughton in his previous role as chief executive and then chairman of British American Tobacco, which he transformed from a conglomerate with tobacco interests into the world’s number two tobacco company with 16 per cent of the market. Leading BAT, which he did for 11 years, may not have made him Mr Popular at dinner parties, but underneath his jovial exterior, Broughton has a layer of tungsten.

‘Martin is always calm in a crisis,’ says Jones. ‘He never loses his cool.’ He packs his time, chairing British Airways and presiding over the CBI as well as owning racehorses and supporting Chelsea football club, but then he is blessed with the well-ordered mind of an accountant along with a dauntingly cheerful mindset. Broughton enjoys controversial industries. As chief executive of BAT he seemed to glide above the flak — a non-smoker himself, he even advised his children not to smoke. ‘I have always believed in people’s right to choose,’ he says in his gravelly London tones.