Big is beautiful

Sir Terry Leahy might be the UK’s most successful businessman. He turned Tesco, love it or loathe it, from a second-tier supermarket worth £7 billion into the £37 billion behemoth of the sector. As an interviewee, however, he is not a natural performer. There is no Bransonian bonhomie about him. He is dressed in a nondescript dark suit, and, though he has no entourage, is accompanied by a publicist from his publisher; he starts to steal not-so-subtle glances at his watch almost as soon as we have started talking. But Leahy’s awkwardness shouldn’t obscure the truths he has to deliver. He has a bracing analysis of the situation that Britain is in.

‘The welfare system in the form that it’s become is unsustainable and this is even before you start to feel the effect of care for the elderly with dementia,’ he says. Across the continent, he warns, ‘Economies are not growing fast enough and haven’t been growing fast enough for a long period of time. The problem with Europe extends way beyond the euro crisis.’ His fundamental worry: there isn’t ‘a coherent model for growth for developed ageing economies’.

Unsurprisingly for a former boss of Tesco, Leahy has little time for sentimentality. He rails, with uncharacteristic passion, against the ‘casual default that small is good, big is bad’. People only say that, he argues, because ‘no one ever got criticised for saying small is good, local is good.’ To his mind, economies of scale are ‘the main reason man has progressed and the others haven’t. We’re the only ones who can trust and exchange.’