If you get up early enough you might spy the solid frame of Allan Leighton running round one of the London parks before he pays a surprise visit to a Royal Mail delivery office. The reaction of the postmen and women is usually the same. ‘They always say, “Oh s***, it’s the chairman”,’ Leighton laughs. He then gathers them round and asks them how it’s going and how they feel. ‘Those visits at half past five in the morning are the most important part of a recovery like this,’ he says firmly. ‘Going to the board meetings is the least important part.’
Tony Blair asked him in 2002 to become chairman of the delivery and Post Office counters business which was then called, absurdly, Consignia; he swiftly dumped the name and set to work with chief executive Adam Crozier to transform the group’s fortunes. ‘We have taken a business that was not really a business, losing £1.5 million a day and not hitting any one of its quality targets, and turned it into a business that makes £1.5 million a day profit and hits all its quality targets.’ These days, though there are still plenty of complaints from customers, 95 per cent of first-class mail arrives the next day — ‘the best service level of any postal service in the world’.
The journey has been bruising for all concerned. I first met Leighton in Leeds in 1997 when he was chief executive of the Asda supermarket group and as bubbly as a bottle of champagne after a bumpy car ride. After 18 years at Mars he had spent five years helping Archie Norman pull Asda back from the brink of bankruptcy and restore it to rude financial health. I forecast then that he would go far.
Less than two years later he and Norman sold Asda to Wal-Mart for £6.7
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