The best dramas in British broadcasting are only found on one channel these days. Parliament TV has hosted its fair share of unsavoury characters over the years but today a new villain joined the rogues’ gallery. Step forward P&O Ferries chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite, who joins the likes of Philip Green, Fred Goodwin and Mike Ashley in being hauled up before a select committee for a ritual grilling. Hubris, folly and lashings of corporate jargon were on the menu today as Hebblethwaite – whose firm sacked 800 staff last week – was duly sliced, diced and skewered before a panel of distinctly unimpressed MPs.
Joint committee chairman Darren Jones got things off to a flying start when the Labour MP opened with this audacious gambit:
When I was reading your biography it seemed pretty light on your experience as a chief executive officer. Are you in this mess because you don’t know what you’re doing, or are you just a shameless criminal?
A stuttering Hebblethwaite failed to answer that particular doozy, merely mumbling something about the ‘opportunity to come and answer questions’ and a half-hearted apology to staff and their families. From there things only got worse for the SS P&O as the ship’s captain came under bombardment from all sides. The intervention of veteran trade union man Andy McDonald was perhaps the clearest portent of an iceberg dead ahead captain.
The Labour MP asked Hebblethwaite why his firm had not consulted with trade unions, prior to the mass redundancies. ‘There’s absolutely no doubt that we were required to consult with the unions’ came the immortal reply, ‘we chose not to do that.’ A disgusted McDonald shot back ‘you chose to break the law’ and asked ‘Do you get in your car and drive down the motorway and see the 70mph sign and say, ‘That’s not going to apply to me, I’m going to do 90 because I think it’s important that I do that’? Is that how you go about your life?’
‘No it isn’t’ Hebblethwaite could only reply. Mayday, mayday. He added that ‘it was our assessment that the change was of such magnitude that no union could possibly accept our proposal’, a response which prompted McDonald to scoff ‘You’re right about that! I’ve never heard such farcical answers to a series of questions.’ As for P&O’s decision to link financial compensation to non-disclosure agreements, it was, in McDonald’s words, ‘absolute thuggery and criminality.’
Talk about a stern reception.
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