Any other business | 2 April 2011

Farewell to a charismatic old bruiser who never threw in the towel

George Walker, the former boxer, gangster’s minder and ‘leisure tycoon’ who died last week, was a persuader — both in the sense that he could be, as he once told me, ‘a bit rough with people’, and in the sense that if he decided to charm you, he was hard to resist. Fortunately, I fell into the second category. I got to know him during the period between his ousting as chief executive of Brent Walker, the conglomerate of pubs, betting shops, yacht marinas and other forms of amusement he built in the Eighties boom on a mountain of debt, and his trial on fraud charges in 1994.

He began by inviting me to tea at his daughter Sarah’s South Kensington mansion — she was the Marchioness of Milford Haven at the time, and had hung George’s portrait alongside her husband’s ancestors.