Sir Paul Nicholson, Lord Lieutenant of County Durham

Dec 14 2009 by Karen Dent, The Journal

He will forever be associated with Vaux but there is much more to Sir Paul Nicholson's life than the Sunderland brewery group. Karen Dent hears about the thrills and spills in both business and pleasure that have marked his career.

Although deeply rooted in the region – our interview takes place in his home near Durham where he was born – Sir Paul travels widely. And he fears the outside image of the region is perhaps not what it could be.

“It’s definitely regarded, I’m afraid, as rather very much public sector and a drain on the prosperous South East.

“I think that both the present and last Government have done quite a lot to try to correct that. I always quote the number of Japanese companies that have come here – so there must be something right – and we’ve always had, properly-led, one of the best labour forces in the country.

“We haven’t got enough small business, though. That didn’t apply in the 19th Century when Tyneside had these families, mainly founded on coal – the Armstrongs of the world.

“We were then almost the powerhouse of the country.”

He has had an international handle on things since becoming part of the Young Presidents’ Organisation, a global group for people under 40 running large businesses.

Now graduated to sister group, the Chief Executives’ Organisation, he remains an active networker.

“You meet people who basically have been in industry from all over the world. It involves a certain amount of travel because they have meetings in various exotic places.” He met the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi during one trip and says: “She ain’t the saint she’s made out to be by the Western Press.

“She’s extremely beautiful and she sat there, with her feet up, and said, ‘Why have you come to my country? You must not come to my country – you are supporting the regime’.

“One of us said, ‘Well, we might invest in the country’ and she exploded at that.

“We then said, ‘What about the jobs it would bring?’ and she said, ‘Oh, they’re only jobs for servants’.”

He also attended a dinner in Cuba hosted by Fidel Castro.

“There were about 60 of us on that party and we were all entertained very lavishly, and then we were all given a box of his very special cigars and a tube of what was alleged to be Cuban Viagra!”

Closer to home, establishing and becoming president of the County Durham Community Foundation is one of his proudest achievements. Foundations originated in the US and ask people to set up endowment funds.

“We have handed out in our time over £15m in grants since 1995,” said Sir Paul. “They’re mainly small grants up to £5,000 to help a community village hall or a group.”

His Lord Lieutenant duties also “keep me very much out of mischief”. He said: “One of the most interesting but sometimes difficult things is you are keeper of the rolls and chairman of the advisory committee on the appointment and the disciplining of magistrates – and the disciplining can be very tricky at times. They’re naughty boys and naughty girls!”

But after a life in the thick of it, he misses the business sharp end.

“One regrets that you’re no longer involved in the nitty-gritty of industry,” he says.

After his experiences during what he calls the Vaux tragedy, he is mistrustful of the modern corporate finance world and illustrates his point with two stories.

The first involved buying a London hotel from Sir Maxwell Joseph, known at the time as the most ruthless takeover king of his generation.

Sir Paul said: “When it came to the detail of the thing, he was as tough as hell. I went to see him eventually and said ‘Damn you, Sir Maxwell, I’ll take it on those terms’.

“He leant back and he opened his drawer and he produced a box of cigars and offered me one. I refused it, but he lit one himself, and he said, ‘Mr Nicholson, I wish you hadn’t said that, you see I had a much better offer’ – ie, he had no legal obligation at all, but he’d given me his word.”

That contrasts with the tale of “an even more famous businessman, who shall be nameless” who agreed to sell a property to a government department.

“Subsequently, someone came along with a much better offer. So what does this businessman do but ring up his pal in the government office and say, ‘Look this wasn’t a very good deal for your lot, really you shouldn’t go ahead with it’.

“That’s an interesting contrast between the old morality and what I would suspect is the new morality.”

Page 3: The Questionnaire