John Gardiner, journalist and businessman, 1936-2023

John Gardiner, who has died aged 87, was both an outstanding financial journalist and a successful businessman. He was chief executive of Laird, the engineering group, for more than 20 years, and later served as chair of Tesco. 

Gardiner was educated at Shoreham Grammar School in Sussex and then at Brighton Polytechnic; he transferred to the London School of Economics for his final year. After graduation, he turned down several City jobs before joining the Prudential as an economist in 1957. From there, he moved to the Financial Times and was soon appointed to the Lex column. This was the start of what David Kynaston, in his history of the FT, has described as that column’s golden age. Together with his close colleague, James Joll (who was later to become finance director of Pearson), he made Lex a hugely influential voice in the financial community.  

Gardiner had the natural scepticism of the good journalist but a real interest in how business worked. He was fearless in his analysis, in his cross questioning of the captains of British industry and utterly straightforward. He and Joll were a formidable pair — noisy, young and self-confident. These were the days before there were swarms of analysts following a company’s every move, and Lex would often be the only outsider to talk to the boss of a large company on its results day. City investors were expected to have read the column by the time they arrived at their desks in the morning. As a strong independent commentator, Lex could also have a decisive impact in a contested takeover bid — another reason for company bosses to treat it with nervous respect.

Within the FT, Gardiner was seen as a model for how financial comment should be written. As Richard Lambert, a Lex writer and later editor of the paper, recalled: “Gardiner was a demanding boss, who would invariably tear your copy to shreds when you passed it through for approval. But he would then take great trouble to explain how you might do better next time.”

In 1968, Gardiner left the FT to join the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation (IRC). This agency had been set up by the Labour government to promote mergers in fragmented industries, but it was also used to rescue important companies that were in danger of financial collapse. One such case, in which Gardiner played a leading part, was Cammell Laird, which owned a large shipyard in Birkenhead as well as a string of engineering businesses.

At the end of 1969, this company was facing a financial crisis as a result of losses on the shipbuilding side, and the government asked the IRC to investigate. Out of the negotiations that followed, the IRC worked out a solution whereby the shipyard was separated from the rest of the company (it later became part of the state-owned British Shipbuilders) and the non-shipbuilding businesses were put into a new company, the Laird Group. 

To most people’s surprise, John Gardiner, one of the IRC’s brightest stars, was made Laird’s chief executive; he was then 34 and had no direct industrial experience. Yet the appointment proved to be a remarkable success.

After taking control, Gardiner began to reshape the company, selling or closing activities that had no chance of making adequate profits and investing in areas where the prospects were better. This was a process which continued throughout Gardiner’s long tenure (1970-1997), with Laird moving in and out of a range of different businesses. Gardiner was sometimes criticised for not having a long-term strategy, but the divestments and acquisitions generally worked well; he regarded diversification as a source of strength. His focus on cash generation and profit kept Laird afloat during a difficult period for British industry.  

Although Gardiner shunned the limelight, he was widely admired in the business community and much in demand as a non-executive director; he served on the board of numerous companies including 3i Group, Enterprise Oil, British Airways and ICL. He was chair of Tesco from 1997 to 2004. He also took on several public appointments, including the chairmanship of the School Teachers’ Pay Review Board, and of a government inquiry into prisons. 

Despite Gardiner’s business success and his services to government, he was never offered a knighthood, an omission that he put down to his never holding back from giving his opinion. He was always an iconoclast, someone who never felt part of the establishment.

Sir Graham Day, who as a lawyer for Canadian Pacific, one of Cammell Laird’s big customers, worked closely with Gardiner during the rescue negotiations (Day later became chair of British Shipbuilders and other British companies), has described him as the great unsung hero of British business.

John Gardiner’s wife Celia, whom he married in 1961, predeceased him. He is survived by their three daughters.