1930-2019 Sir Michael Edwardes

RECALLING THE MAN WHO SINGLEHANDEDLY RESCUED JAGUAR FROM BRITISH LEYLAND

- 

TIME CAN BE CRUEL TO HEROES. MOST READERS WON'T have heard the name Sir Michael Edwardes before, but the diminutive South African-born businessman shredded British Leyland and defeated the all-powerful and destructive unions in Britain which ruined the country's hallowed motor industry. He reinstated Jaguar Cars rather than it being 'Leyland Large Car Plant number 1', and brought in 40 year old former Union Carbide executive John Egan to either save Jaguar or shut it down.

We were at Browns Lane in April 1980 on the day Egan privately revealed Jaguar Cars was now autonomous within British Leyland, and that he intended to fight for Jaguar's survival.

But Michael Edwardes laid the masterplan.

He was a key player in the Thatcherite revolution: a businessman who confronted the unions and reshaped a national institution in a cliff-hanging serial of industrial relations. But Edwardes, who has died aged 88, was actually the choice of an exasperated Labour government to take over, in 1977, as Chairman of the failing British Leyland motor company and he departed when Margaret Thatcher lost confidence in him in 1982.

In between, he became the highest profile businessman in Britain. He was an inspiration for managers who had come to feel powerless, but a bogeyman for left wing trade unionists who accused him of reinventing macho management and called him 'the poison dwarf'.