Soames shows the Churchill spirit needed to rescue the CBI
Rupert Soames’s grandfather Winston Churchill had a phrase that neatly summed up his approach to leadership: Action This Day.
It epitomised the wartime prime minister’s determination to cut through inertia, negativity and bureaucracy to make the important things happen.
The new president of the CBI will need a lot of that if he is to save what was once Britain’s foremost business lobby group, now struggling to repair its reputation.
Fortunately, Soames’s impressive CV and ebullient personality suggest that he has inherited a fair dose of the energy and optimism that is essential for any leader coming into an organisation hoping to save it after what he rightly described as a “near death experience”.
With the settlement agreed with dismissed former director general Tony Danker this week the CBI can begin to row away from the wreckage of the events that almost destroyed it last year.
The humbling of the CBI could not have come at a worse time, with relations between the Government and the business community at a damaging low.
Soames, who impressed the City during long spells running Aggreko and Serco, has begun the job of persuading those members that quit the CBI in disgust last year to come back into the tent.
The decision of PwC to return is a promising start. But it remains a long and arduous road ahead if the CBI is ever to regain its place at the top table with government.
Soames, the Eton and Oxford educated former Bullingdon Club member from the most famous of Tory dynasties, will probably have to rebuild the CBI working with Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves on the other side of an autumn election. It could be a key relationship if Britain’s economy is to pick up pace again.
As with his grandfather, who forged a close bond with Clement Attlee during the war, it will be an unlikely but vital meeting of minds.
