Abbey’s Lord Fix-it becomes TV star
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Lord Terry Burns, Abbey’s chairman since February 2002 and a one-time Treasury mandarin, is to become chairman of television station Channel 4 which is probably in as much need of TLC now as Abbey was then.
For the record, in February 2003 Abbey posted its first full-year loss of £984m - hardly eye-watering stuff by recent standards but a big fall from grace for the former building society which in 2001 made a profit of £1.47bn.
No doubt Lord Fix-it, as Burns is known, will be using some of the expertise he gained leading a 2005 review into the BBC’s funding but then again, the good lord has a huge bank of experience to dip into whatever he’s doing.
He earned his Fix-it nickname after he left the Treasury in 1998 and embarked on a succession of government inquiries and reviews. He also led a review of the the Football Association.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Until recently Burns was chairman of Marks & Spencer, is a non- executive director at Banco Santander, a nonexecutive director at Pearson Group, president of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, president of the Society of Business Economists and chairman of the governing board of the Royal Academy of Music.
His list of directorships is actually longer but Chatroom thinks you get the point.
