‘This is not an industry for pussycats’

If you built a composite portrait of Leigh Clifford from the handful of newspaper profiles ever written about him, you would be presented with an archetypal Aussie miner, as tough as the rocks his company digs from the earth. Shortly before taking up, six years ago, the post of chief executive of Rio Tinto — the London-based international mining giant — Clifford famously brandished a clenched fist at a group of environmental activists who stormed the stage at a shareholder meeting.