Upwardly mobile

Many years ago, Chris Gent tried to explain to me how computers worked. I was a trainee banker; he was a systems manager in the same firm; his explanation had something to do with ferrite rods and magnetic poles. It was a very fluent explanation, but I never quite got the hang of it. That is perhaps why Gent — now Sir Christopher — became a great tycoon of the technology age and I didn’t.

He moved swiftly on from that airless back office in Holborn where we first met. After a few more years in computers he joined a fledgling mobile-phone company which had been set up by Racal, the defence electronics group, behind a curry house in Newbury. Its name was Vodafone and, in 18 years as its managing director and chief executive, Gent built it into the biggest telecommunications business in the world.

When he stepped down in 2003, the Daily Mail compared him to John D. Rockefeller. He was also bracketed with Lord Browne of BP — of whom more in a moment — as an outstanding British business leader of his generation. Other commentators were less fulsome, drawing attention to the roller-coaster performance of Vodafone’s shares (along with everyone else’s) in the boom-bust end of the 1990s; the £1 billion Vodafone overpaid the Treasury for a third-generation mobile-phone licence (again, along with everyone else); and the £10 million bonus Gent collected for completing his most controversial deal, the £100 billion takeover of Mannesmann of Germany.

But the black marks were well outnumbered by gold stars. At his farewell AGM, shareholders awarded him the unusual corporate accolade of a standing ovation — and everyone wondered what this world-class executive, still only 54, would do next.