Selling a different kind of capitalism

During his school holidays, Stuart Hampson used to help his mother behind the counter of the family drapers shop in Oldham, Lancashire. But as he grew up, he set his sights higher than mere retailing. ‘I always had a fixation on becoming a civil servant,’ he says crisply, in an accent stripped of any hint of northern origins. ‘I just thought it was the right thing to do; I still think working in government service is extremely important.’

Now the chairman of the iconic John Lewis Partnership, where the staff owns the company, Hampson retains a strong sense of that early virtue. Tall and clean-cut, with a steely gaze, in another life he would have made a good archbishop. His lay congregation may be somewhat broader than the Church of England’s, but its heart is quintessentially English. Whether Hampson is opposing Sunday trading as he did in the 1990s, speaking out against the destruction of our town centres, leading the Royal Society of Arts inquiry into ‘Tomorrow’s Company’, or writing about a sustainable future for British farming as president of the Royal Agricultural Society, Hampson has his long, elegant finger on the pulse of middle-class sensibility.