The boat Inchcape rocked
TO LORD Inchcape goes the credit of frustrating what may be the silliest takeover ever seriously meant. This was P & O's bid, 20 years ago, for Bovis the builders, to secure the services of its master builder, Frank Sanderson. I worked out at the time that it valued him far more highly than his weight in gold. Lazards put the deal togeth- er, both boards nodded it through, and only Inchcape, a non-executive director of P & 0, could not stand it. He resigned. Slowly he found support, and at a stormy meeting of shareholders, P & O's board had its plan voted down. Now it was the chairman who resigned, and Inchcape who moved into the chair which had once been his grandfather's. Bovis proved to contain a stock of overvalued land and a secondary bank which had to be rescued. P & 0 mopped up. Now that he has died, I would like to add a memorial clause to the non- execs' unctuous code. A non-exec can have no higher duty than to cause embarrassment and make a nuisance of himself as he thinks right, and the Inchcape clause would say so.
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