The boss of Waitrose is to be made a Foreign Office trade minister as David Cameron continues to try and bring more businesspeople into his government.
Mark Price, managing director of Waitrose and deputy chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, will be given a peerage before taking up the role of trade minister in April. He is replacing Francis Maude, the former MP, who has done the job since entering the House of Lords after the election.
Price follows a number of other businesspeople into Cameron’s government. The prime minister has previously given ministerial jobs to Joanna Shields, a tech executive, Lucy Neville-Rolfe, a former Tesco boss, Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist, Ian Livingston, the former BT chief executive, Stephen Green, the former HSBC boss, and George Bridges, a lobbyist.
Price has worked for the John Lewis Partnership, which owns Waitrose, for more than 30 years and had been tipped to take over as chair of Channel 4. The supermarket executive, known as the “Chubby Grocer”, has been Channel 4’s deputy chairman since July 2013.
He had already made a first move into Whitehall when he joined the Cabinet Office board as a non-executive director late last year.
