‘This is not an industry for pussycats’

If you built a composite portrait of Leigh Clifford from the handful of newspaper profiles ever written about him, you would be presented with an archetypal Aussie miner, as tough as the rocks his company digs from the earth. Shortly before taking up, six years ago, the post of chief executive of Rio Tinto — the London-based international mining giant — Clifford famously brandished a clenched fist at a group of environmental activists who stormed the stage at a shareholder meeting. He quickly withdrew when he realised how the picture might look in the papers, but one mining analyst still describes him as ‘a hairy-arsed mining man rather than a polished suit’. In short, he’s the last man you’d expect to find showing off a 16th-century leather-bound Latin volume.

‘It was translated by Herbert Hoover, who was the first managing director of Zinc Corporation, which became the Z in RTZ [as Rio Tinto used to be known],’ he explains, striding over to his ancient copy of Agricola’s De Re Metallica, the founding text of mining and metalurgy, mounted in a glass box in his spacious St James’s Square office. Clifford seems almost patrician as he picks out a copy of the translation from his bookshelf and delivers a quick précis of Hoover’s progress from mining engineer in Australia to president of the United States.

Perhaps six years in Rio’s clubby headquarters, with its leather furniture and fine paintings, has rubbed off on the man who spent a year toiling down a mine after university to gain his mine-manager certificate. Then again, it’s not as if he sprang from the bush; his father was managing director of the Bank of Adelaide. Clifford laughs when asked about his reputation for toughness. ‘At the end of the day, this is not an industry for pussycats,’ he says.