Sir Colin Southgate obituary

Perhaps working on the principle that if you want something doing you should give it to a busy man, in 1998 Tony Blair, the newly elected prime minister, chose Southgate to shake up the Royal Opera House, a public body then in dire need of professional management. The opera house had been poorly run, partly because of infighting among the managements of the orchestra, opera and ballet. Blair also thought the place needed to do something about its elitist image and Southgate, who preferred Queen and Tina Turner to opera, seemed the perfect chap to do it.

After an initial gaffe in which the new chairman said at a press conference that “I don’t want to sit next to somebody with a singlet, smelly shorts and a pair of trainers when I go to the opera” he got to work bringing opera to the people. He broadened its appeal by relaying performances outside to the Covent Garden piazza on large screens.

In terms of taking on the management, it helped that he already had experience of dealing with rival factions, having overseen the demerger of EMI with Thorn, the electrical and TV rentals side. He was also used to handling oversized creative egos on the EMI playlist. At the ROH, heads soon rolled, beginning with the chief executive, Mary Allen.

After first insisting that he could continue running EMI while trying to sort out the ROH, Southgate was persuaded to stand down from the former role after a difficult 18 months in which the two jobs overlapped. “That last year at EMI was awful,” he recalled, “while my initiation at ROH was tough.”

“The news that he is finally ready to move on will be cheered by investors at EMI,” said this newspaper’s Tempus company-analysis column. “The Spice Girls, Radiohead and the Verve have all been great successes, but the current line-up of acts looks pretty dismal.”

Southgate with Richard Branson, left, celebrating the sale of Virgin Music to Thorn EMI in 1992

RICHARD BAKER/IN PICTURES VIA GETTY IMAGES

For several months in his new job Southgate did not even know whether the ROH was solvent. “You have to get certain things right,” he said. “One is where the money is coming from to keep the place going. The first year was horrendous. I started in February and I didn’t get any figures that I believed in till May. The place was a shambles.”

There was another dimension to ROH. The building was undergoing extensive reconstruction, the £178 million cost of which Blair knew would be measured by the wider world in terms of the schools and hospitals that could be built with the money. The National Lottery chipped in £58 million, but the project still relied on wealthy private donors such as the Sainsbury supermarket family.

Not the biggest contributor, but certainly the most vocal, was Dame Vivien Duffield, daughter of the late property tycoon Sir Charles Clore. As ROH deputy chairwoman, she expected her views to be taken seriously, complaining at one point that the lavatories had not been properly cleaned. “Colin was no shrinking violet,” said Duffield, “and neither was I. We did clash. There were rows. I was a thorn in his side.”

“I might be bossy,” Southgate said. “I was told by a friend that Vivien described me as ‘an Anglo-Saxon male chauvinist pig’. I am Anglo-Saxon. She was upset with me because I put some governance standards into the organisation.” Under those rules, Duffield had overstayed her welcome on the ROH board. He forced her out, to her lament that he had undertaken a “gradual erosion of everything I’d been doing”.

Nevertheless, by the time he stepped down as chairman in 2003 he had sorted out the management, put the finances on an even keel and finished the renovations on time with a gala that the Queen and Blair attended.

Colin Grieve Southgate was born in New Malden, then in Surrey, in 1938, the only son of Cyril, a fruit merchant in the old Covent Garden market, and Edith Southgate. During the Second World War Edith took Colin and his elder sister, Jean, to Northampton. After the war Colin went to primary school in Kingston, a few miles from New Malden. When he was a teenager the family moved to Epsom.

By then he had won a place at City of London School, which entailed an hour’s train journey each way. He hated sports, loved mathematics and rebelled. “I was not too happy with the conventions of public school, the rules and regulations,” he said. “They expected you always to do something a certain way. I was not a loner, I suppose I was one of the lads, in the gang, but I was also pretty independent. I did not need to be part of a crowd.”

Southgate was excused National Service because of bad eyesight and his grandmother persuaded him that, rather than go to university, he would be better off training as an actuary. He spent what he called the worst two and a half years of his life at National Provident Institution before a friend pointed him towards computers.

He took a job at ICT, later named ICL, where he customised company software packages. In the coding department he met Sally Mead, daughter of the chairman, Sir Cecil Mead. They married in 1962 and had four children. Simon is a property developer, Nicholas works in television and animation, Emma is a GP and Rebecca is an artist.

Over the years they divided their time between their 16th-century Berkshire estate, the south of France and a Tuscan farmhouse. Southgate followed Simon’s rugby and Emma’s riding exploits and, when they grew up, he introduced them to French vineyards and his own love of gardening. When he died he was building an arboretum.

“Dad had a real presence,” Nick said, “always gregarious, fun and extremely generous. He was a force of nature.”

In 1970 Southgate and his father-in-law formed Software Sciences which they sold twice, first to BOC, then to Thorn, making them both wealthy. Southgate took 18 months off before rejoining Thorn in 1983 as head of business and security systems.

The following year he was promoted to the Thorn EMI board and a year later became chief executive of a group that then embraced electronics, defence, retailing, leisure and music.

“My own view as early as 1985 was that the one part of the business with the potential to operate globally was music,” Southgate said. “I always wanted to get it back to its original state.” He was especially pleased with EMI’s signing of the Spice Girls, who he called, in his unreconstructed way, “sex on ten legs”.

He would stay two nights a week at a company-owned Mayfair base, where he entertained business and political contacts. “I take it all quite seriously,” he said. “I’m fussy, I pick the menu and all the wines. I’m a good organiser, I have the timing worked out like a military exercise.”

EMI was broken up in 2012 and largely divided between Universal Music Group and Sony/ATV Music Publishing. Southgate became chairman of the headhunter Whitehead Mann Group.

Esther Dye, a former friend and colleague, said: “Colin could be a bit forbidding because he was testing and challenging all the time. You had to stand your corner. ‘Can’t do’ was not in his vocabulary. He refused to conform, which could be both a weakness and a strength.”

Sir Colin Southgate, businessman, was born on July 24, 1938. He died of a heart attack on July 26, 2021, aged 83