Mogul T tried these fi g ures on a visitin g tycoon, 1.who
was horrified. 'The last thing you should do with oil', he protested, 'is to burn it under boilers.' (The Shah thought so too; oil, he used to say, is a noble mineral....) But, my mogul reflected, it might explain why his company had been able to sell American coals to Newcastle — and how was his friend Ian MacGregor getting on? Getting on well with the Treasury (I said), where they thought he was on their side, which was something they found refreshing, at the top of a nationalised in- dustry. Less well, obviously, with his col- leagues on the Coal Board, who were rather more the sort of people the Treasury was used to. These people had gone out of their way to rubbish their Chairman's hopeful forecasts for the coal industry of the 1990s. The economy, they muttered, could not possibly grow fast enough to buy all the coal he expected to produce. 'Well,' said the mogul, 'that may be the difference bet- ween Ian and the rest of them. He's used to thinking of coal as something you can ex- port.'
Christopher Fildes
Previous page
