- Martin Wainwright
They were words I never expected to hear from Sir Ken Morrison - in fact I nearly had to pinch the Yorkshire Post's business editor David Parkin and he nearly had to pinch me. But there the phrase was in our notebooks, as we clustered round him at the end of a gruelling annual general meeting at which Sir Ken announced he is to step back from day-to-day control of Wm Morrison after the troubled supermarket chain admitted it had no idea about the state of its finances. "Yes, I think it's possible to overplay the Yorkshire hand," he said. Mind you, he prefaced the comment by saying that, naturally, he knew that Yorkshire people were superior to everyone else.
All light-hearted banter (and I hasten to say that I am a Yorkshireman and therefore not coming to the subject from a snooty Southern viewpoint). But the Yorkshire-London culture clash of Morrison Supermarkets' current travails is worth pondering. One of the flaws in the previously error-free career of this 74-year-old magnate has been the unbridled Yorkshireness of his approach since swallowing (and subsequently choking on) Safeways. In fact, we could win the Guardian Unlimited prize for the ugliest word of the year by calling it Yorkshirisation.
That coining would only be following in the footsteps of Sir Ken and his board, who freely use the term "Morrisonising" for what they are doing to Safeways branches. It has grated with the city. Unlike their many predecessors who have conquered the City of London from Yorkshire, from Marks & Sparks to Rowntrees Fruit Gums, they have not made compromises with the way things are done in the Square Mile.
The AGM displayed this attitude in spades. Although the huge but invisible institutional shareholders had clocked up ominous tallies of votes against Sir Ken, the 400 souls actually present in Bradford's Cedar Court hotel were Yorkshirisers to a man. Every small shareholder who spoke from the floor sang a hymn to "Yorkshire acumen", Sir Ken's Bradford hard-headedness and general grit. The apotheosis, or more accurately nadir, came when one fan said that not wasting money on "carrying" independent non-executive directors was precisely the sort of thing that made Sir Ken so special.
In a Yorkshirised world that would probably be true. Sir Ken has flourished mightily and deservedly without the strict rules of company governance required by big institutional investors in the City. But he is no longer in a such a world; and like all those illustrious business predecessors from the region, he would have shown more hard-headed acumen to have acknowledged that.
Lord Graham Kirkham of the DFS furniture group is perhaps the best model, as Sir Ken belatedly recognised with that pinch-me-if-it's-real comment. When he floated the company, Kirkham also made much of "Yorkshire values of being down-to-earth, a very strong work ethic and loyalty, and knowing the value of money". But he confined his public resentment of London ways to spending £3,500,000 on a Gainsborough painting entitled Peasants Going to Market.
