Career:
Sir Gerry started out as a civil servant, which turned out to be a lot more exciting than it sounds, as after a stint in the Department of Health and Social Security he moved to the Treasury, where he found himself overseeing Margaret Thatcher’s shareholder revolution.
In all, he was involved in 20 privatisations, including British Telecom, British Airways and British Gas, earning himself the moniker Mr Privatisation in the process. When he was blocked from becoming Chancellor Nigel Lawson’s Press Secretary, he left the public sector to join Schroders, where he reinvented himself as an investment banker.
After a distinguished career encompassing the City, the Far East and Wall Street, Sir Gerry left banking and soon found himself much in demand as a non-executive director. He has sat on the boards of institutions including the Tote and RAF Strike Command. In the commercial sphere, he was Chairman of Candover Investments from 2006 to 2011 and has been Chairman of Standard Life since 2007.
Offices held:Chairman, TheCityUK, the representative body for the financial industry and professional services in the UK
Lead non-executive director, UK Ministry of Defence
Board member, RAF Strike Command
Board member, the Tote
Board member, The Shareholder Executive
Member of the Advisory Council, the UK-India Business Council
First job:The son of a communist carpet-layer from Streatham, south London, he joined the Department of Health and Social Security in 1972 as private secretary to the then Health Minister David Owen after graduating from Merton College, Oxford.
On moving from the civil service to Schroders:
“In the Treasury, or if you changed jobs, the flow of business just sort of carried on; you’d be sitting there and files would come in and you would deal with them. And so they gave me this nice little room in Schroders, and I sat there, and after about 48 hours, a dreadful kind of truth dawned upon me that it wasn’t like that in the bank. You had to do it yourself!”
Best break:
When he was having New Year’s Day lunch with his children at Pizza on the Park in London on his return from New York: “One of my old clients came up to me and said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were back. Would you like to join my board?’ ”
On the City as financial capital of Europe:
“We believe that the City would be diminished if it wasn’t the European capital. We’re not nationalistic, because there are more German bankers in London than there are in Berlin. There are more French bankers here than there are in Paris, and that’s because [the City] and our wholesale markets work best when people concentrate together and you have these big pools of liquidity and expertise.”
His aims and ambitions in a nutshell:
“I am an intellectual mercenary. I do things for the intellectual challenge rather than just the money.”
Worst piece of advice he was ever given:
“An eminent civil servant told me once as a young civil servant that you should address a task with energy, but never enthusiasm. I hated that piece of advice because I believe you need to have both. What I’ve learned is that success only comes if you apply yourself, work hard and have enthusiasm.”
Family life:
Divorced, Sir Gerry has one son – who is a partner at Linklaters – and two daughters, plus three grandchildren, with another one on the way.
His motto:
“Simplicity is everything.”
The original version of this article was published in the March 2015 print edition of the Review.