Lord Burns must have realised that when you are the chairman of one of Britain’s best-loved companies, then you have to be able to take the rough with the smooth. For every eccentric inquiry as to the origin of lamb chops in the Marks & Spencer store in Gloucester, you will be subject to questions that are dripping in contempt.
And yesterday was no exception for the man who last year took over from Paul Myners, the “people’s champion”. John Farmer, an attendee at just about every FTSE company’s annual shareholder meeting and a big fan of Mr Myners, called on Lord Burns to step down and make way for a chairman with “more flair and elan”. Why, Mr Farmer wondered, “do we have to have a chief executive held back by dead wood?”
It is a measure of Lord Burns’s experience and skill that he was able to navigate such tirades so easily. Indeed, he even had time to joke with Stuart Rose, M&S’s dapper chief executive, about his suit.
Certainly, the M&S shareholder meeting must have seemed a doddle to Lord Burns, who was jeered by shareholders at Abbey National’s acrimonious 2004 shareholder meeting, at which the sale of the bank to Banco Santander of Spain was voted through.
Lord Burns, 63, became chairman of Abbey National in 2002 and hired Luqman Arnold, the former UBS banker, to turn around its performance. However, progress was slow and the Spanish sailed in. He remains chairman of Abbey National and a nonexecutive of Santander and also leads the board of Glas Cymru.
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He was Permanent Secretary to the Treasury between 1991 and 1998, when he was appointed a life peer. He was tipped as a possible replacement for Michael Grade as BBC Chairman, but ruled himself out despite his experience chairing an independent committee on the BBC’s future. This review recommended that the Board of Governors should be scrapped and replaced with a new and independent body.
Lord Burns, is also a director of Pearson, publisher of the Financial Times.