Coal's ghost walks
BEFORE Ian MacGregor pulled the plas- tic bag over his face, but after it became clear that a green baize cloth might have been better, I was musing in this column (July 14, 1984) about the qualities we should seek in a chairman of the Coal Board, if we had to start again. The phantom coalman, I called him. He would need experience in the management and direction of a large and professionally-run company, skilled in its relations with Gov- ernment: ICI would be ideal. He should understand the coal industry, in theory (a first class honours degree in coal mining would be preferred) and in practice. He should have seen it from outside, as a supplier, and from inside, as a manager, preferably for long enough to remember what it was like before it was nationalised. Ideally, he might have lived with a mining family, and be sensitive to its feelings, and able to articulate them. By this time, the short list had come down to one name: Sir Robert Haslam. He had, in fact, been the Whitehall patronage machine's original choice for the Coal Board, but the Prime Minister insisted on Mr MacGregor, and Sir Robert went off to British Steel. Now the phantom coalman is materialising at last. The need is to bind up coal's wounds, and the man for that is Bob Haslam.
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