They may have been impatient but they have never been hostile

They may have been impatient but they have never been hostile. I’ve never actually detected impatience, by the way.”The demerger was his idea, not – as is so often the case – dictated by frustrated shareholders. Earnings per share were 1p when he arrived and are now 34.4p. Sales were £500m and have since risen to £2.9bn.Mr Habgood is now demerging Bunzl, spinning off Filtrona as a stand-alone company while giving up his full-time executive role to become part-time chairman, alongside his new Whitbread chairmanship and seat on the M&S board.”The nature of the businesses we started with were very specialist, niche businesses. No big headline-grabbing acquisitions, no drama and absolutely no profits warnings.”The style has been incremental and we’ve multiplied value by seven or eight times from a company worth £300m or so when I arrived to something like £2.4bn.” This is his modesty kicking in. Bunzl supplies all the bits and pieces that trades such as catering, hospitality and retail need but can’t source efficiently themselves – stuff such as plastic bags, trays and cups.The other distinct part is Filtrona, a smaller business than outsourcing but fast growing. It is a fibre and plastics technology products company that makes, among other things, cigarette filters.But Mr Habgood has made his changes incrementally He is one of the stock market’s tortoises rather than hares.

When I joined, Paul Myners was interim chairman, and M&S is in the process of deciding who should be chairman going forward.”M&S and Whitbread certainly stand to benefit from Mr Habgood’s presence in their boardrooms. A former management consultant, he made the switch to the real world in the late Eighties, becoming chief executive of Tootal, the textiles group acquired in an expensive hostile bid by Sir David Alliance’s Coats Viyella.In 1991 he joined Bunzl, a company that even today not many people have heard of. Yet in his 14 years at the helm he has transformed it from a hotchpotch conglomerate into a lean, high-performance stock market star even though its core businesses remain seemingly mundane.After a series of disposals, its main operations are in the modish sector of outsourcing. I would not expect the chairmanship of Whitbread to take more than a day or two a week. I think the chairmanship of a company like M&S would take more time than that,” Mr Habgood says.So is that a sign that Mr Myners should start to lower his expectations?”I’m not going to comment on that, as you would expect.

But annoyingly for his fans, he recently announced plans to become chairman of another FTSE 100 company, the venerable Whitbread.So does the chairman of M&S need to be focused pretty much on that job alone, in terms of boardroom roles, or could they afford to flit between, say, two or three? “Bigger, more complex companies obviously take more time. The market isn’t always right, yet it’s more likely to make the right choices on capital allocation than the politicians. As long as that lasts, Britain will continue to reap the benefits of its market-driven approach to industrial policy.. Yet across the piste, we seem to be getting it more right than the Continent.

Britain’s Pharmaceuticals Price Regulation Scheme, for instance, which rewards drug companies according to the amount of research and development they undertake in the UK, has been hugely instrumental in preserving and attracting top pharma jobs to these shores, so much so that even the Continentals are now scrambling to follow it.John Devaney, chairman of Marconi, says he cannot understand why BT ostracised his company To his mind, they’ve made the wrong decision Perhaps they have. For those that think this a better way of saving and creating jobs, just look at the unemployment figures – Britain at 5 per cent, France and Germany at 10.Government still has a role to play in industry and business, if only because it is such a large proportion of the economy and therefore a major purchaser. The essential elements of this Thatcherite legacy have lived on under Labour, and though it can be a brutal taskmaster, it has also served Britain extraordinarily well over the past 20 years, carving out from the wreckage of Britain’s industrial past a bright new, service based future. Many of the old protections, by contrast, continue to exist on the Continent, both in the labour market and the business landscape more generally. Just as jobs protected means fewer jobs created, business that is indulged with special favours means correspondingly less capital for innovation and start-ups.In both Germany and France, the incumbent telecom operators are still state-controlled, and it is certain beyond all doubt that when they come to place their own orders for the next generation of network technology, the lion’s share of the work will go to local producers. And as with MG Rover, as soon as the Chinese had got what they wanted, they disappeared over the horizon.

Huawei, the Chinese company Marconi’s chief executive, Mike Parton, was hoping to link with is to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of BT’s contract.If Britain still has an industrial policy, it can be summarised as “let the markets decide”. Like the Longbridge car maker, Marconi too was talking to the Chinese about the possibility of joint ventures. Disaster, it seems, is infectious.Nor do the parallels with MG Rover end there. Along the way he sold Leyland trucks to Daf, which then promptly went bust.Eventually he was recruited to succeed Lord Weinstock at GEC, which he demerged, selling the defence business to British Aerospace and keeping the telecoms equipment interests for himself as Marconi This was a business he never properly understood. One way or another, Lord Simpson has cut quite a swathe through British industry.Those that think there’s no such thing as coincidence might reflect on the fact that the head of communications as Marconi careered out of control was one Martin Sixsmith, who then went on to become chief press officer under Stephen Byers at the Department of Transport.