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— Movers and Shakers —
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Adair Turner, the new chairman of the Financial Services Authority, is distrusted by the business establishment for being too close to Britain's nominally socialist government and by the labor unions for being too close to the bosses. So he must be doing something right. Starting in September, Turner, 52, will take the reins of the FSA, the U.K.'s financial services regulator and watchdog. His brief will be to raise standards and morale at an organization badly damaged by its failure to foresee the meltdown at mortgage lender Northern Rock plc and by a string of senior staff resignations. To succeed, he will require leadership, courage and plenty of what many see as his main assets, diplomacy and charm. But he will also require backbone, decision and tenacity. The jury's out on his score on those attributes, but he stood up to Prime Minister (and former Finance Minister) Gordon Brown when he headed a government inquiry into state pensions.
That earned him a reputation for strength of character,
but his detractors talk of him as a box ticker who won't take a
decision until all his rows and columns are complete. And his lack of
hands-on managerial experience is also sometimes held against him.
Officially Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, Turner now chairs the government's Committee on Climate Change, which is looking at the effects of global warming and how to reduce Britain's carbon footprint. He will continue to work on that committee two days a week until his report is complete early next year. He has also chaired the Low Pay Commission and the Pensions Commission and is chairman of the Economic and Social Research Council and the Overseas Development Institute. A self-described technocrat, Turner is a part-time lecturer at the London School of Economics and also holds nonexecutive directorships at Standard Chartered Bank plc and employee-pension-fund buyout specialist Paternoster UK Ltd., from which he will step down when he joins the FSA. After obtaining a double first-class degree in economics and history from the University of Cambridge, he joined oil company BP plc and then Chase Manhattan Bank in 1979. In 1982 he moved to management consultancy McKinsey & Co., and in 2000, he joined Merrill Lynch & Co., rising to vice chairman. Turner was also director of the Confederation of British Industry between 1995 and 1999, lobbying on behalf of Britain's biggest businesses. Politically, his views have shifted from right to center-left over a career that started with the Cambridge University Conservative Association, took him to membership of the short-lived Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s and now finds him sitting on the nonaffiliated "cross-benches" in the House of Lords, Britain's upper house of Parliament. George Galloway, the Scottish lawmaker who famously harangued the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee over his alleged involvement in the Oil for Food scandal in Iraq, likened the appointment of a former banker like Turner to oversee the financial services industry to "Dracula being put in charge of the blood bank." Yet in the 1990s, as head of the CBI, Turner earned the nickname "Red" Adair. That was less because of his resemblance to the swaggering American oil-field fireman than because he tried to build closer relations between traditionally Conservative-voting businessmen and politically red "New Labour" government. At the FSA, he will need his nickname-sake's trouble-shooter skills during his five-year-term, as well as his contacts in government to win his political battles. But he is more likely to be fighting on behalf of the small shareholder, depositor or insurance-scam victim against the worst abuses of the financial services industry than to be doling out their blood to hungry bankers or insurance salesmen. Browse other Movers & shakers stories
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Dracula or hellfighter?
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