John King: John King, Lord King of Wartnaby, who has died aged 86, was the epitome of the Thatcherite businessman.
Acerbic, intolerant, relentless, with the toughest of free market groundings, his privatisation of British Airways was spectacularly successful, even though it was later clouded by the dirty-tricks scandal which accelerated his retirement.
His belligerent attitude to Margaret Thatcher's critics was typified by his resignation from the CBI after its director general, Sir Terence Beckett, threatened a bare-knuckled fight with the government. But he could strong-arm the Tories, too; cancelling political donations, for example, over a dispute on Heathrow landing slots.
King's career was a cautionary tale of free enterprise culture in 20th-century Britain. Born in Brentford, west London, with a father, Albert, serving as a soldier in the first World War, and an Irish mother, Kathleen, he was brought up in Dunsfold, Surrey, where his father became a postman. His schoolmates remembered him as a snappy dresser, but a dunce in class.
Leaving without qualifications, he took manual jobs in engineering and motor workshops around Guildford, before becoming a car salesman and marrying the boss's daughter, Lorna Sykes, in 1941. It was a partnership - in business and in life - which lasted until her death from cancer in 1969.
With Sykes's support, King set up a motor business, Whitehouse Motors. Though the motor side later went bust, by then it had diversified into engineering work and, crucially, he had been allocated modern, automatic American machine tools by virtue of War Ministry contracts for aircraft parts.
At the end of the second World War, he shifted his firm's operations to Ferrybridge in Yorkshire, first doing jobbing engineering work, but then, as Pollard Ball and Roller Bearing, becoming Britain's third-largest manufacturer of ball bearings.
It was a hard school; both he and Lorna worked 12-hour days in the factory. Both learned to fly, and, on one occasion, Lorna took their aircraft to Ireland to raise money to keep the firm afloat. King also began an obsession with hunting and in the 1960s bought a 2,000-acre estate at Wartnaby, Leicestershire.
King left Pollocks in 1969 with a personal profit of £3 million after the merger of the three leading British ball-bearing manufacturers. That same year he bought a £20,000 diamond necklace for Lorna's burial.
By now King was developing the formidable networking skills which would mark his future career. He had learned how to get his businesses newspaper attention and had moved into political circles, in part via the ubiquitous John Poulson, the corrupt architect and developer who was married to Lorna's sister.
At his dying wife's request, King tried - but failed - to rescue the Poulson businesses, but in the process met Reginald Maudling, the former Conservative chancellor. In 1970 Maudling attended King's second wedding, to Isabel Monckton, the daughter of Viscount Galway.
King now quickly found new business positions, returning to Guildford in 1970 - with suitable publicity - to take over as chairman of the Dennis commercial vehicle manufacturer and, more significantly, become chairman of Babcock and Wilcox, the heavy engineering company which was one of the prime manufacturers of power station boilers.
The position brought an office in St James's and a voice in the CBI. At Babcock he instituted a necessary, but only partially successful, policy of diversifying away from boiler production.
By the mid-1970s King was a CBI and Whitehall insider, on the review board for government contracts and paying special attention to relations and financing between the City and industry. He was knighted in 1979.
Marked out as he was as the kind of industrialist who might run a nationalised industry, the call duly came, to the British Steel Corporation, though King rejected it. He wanted something that was "doable". And that same year his opportunity came, with the Tories' return to power and Thatcher's first election victory. King had been an early supporter of her radical shift to free market values.
Almost immediately he was appointed to the National Enterprise Board (NEB), Labour's mechanism for restructuring industry; in 1980 he became chairman, with a clear brief to run it down. Typically combative, he used the letters column of the Daily Telegraph to criticise his predecessor's policies and define his view that the NEB was merely "a reluctant provider of funds of last resort".
Then, in 1981, came the job he had lobbied for, the chairmanship of British Airways. The company was certainly in need of a new direction. Formed by a merger between the old British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and British European Airways (BEA) years before, it still showed the old rivalries, and its customer service was dreadful; cabin staff grudged passengers even a glass of water on flights to Paris. Financially, it had plummeted into loss against a budget which had promised rising profits.
But the key to King's appointment was his brief to bring in private capital - in essence, to privatise the airline - the kind of project that he and other Thatcher advisers had been mulling over for years. It was by no means a no-brainer; one City voice at the time commented: "I suffer the service. Don't say I have got to buy shares as well."
So King worked a revolution at British Airways with the help of smart branding and advertising, a dedication to customer service and some powerful financial engineering, which took early write-offs to facilitate rising profits and later privatisation.
One of his first actions was to commission the accountants Price Waterhouse to produce an in-depth report on the company, on which he based much of his subsequent strategy. He cut jobs at all levels, including the boardroom. Executive perks were hit; managers had to down-
scale their company cars. Overall numbers shrank from 52,000 to 37,500 in two years. His key move was to bring in Colin Marshall, then running Avis in the US, as chief executive. Marshall's remorseless attention to detail and King's vision and business contacts proved a winning combination.
A brilliant slogan - "The world's favourite airline", based on research which showed that, while BA did not have the largest number of customers, it had the widest international spread - was allied to an unflagging drive to put customers first. King was demanding, basing action on careful research, though he was not always close to the details. After one press conference a PR assistant advised reporters: "Please don't use any of the figures. He has got them all wrong."
At the start press relations had been uncertain, but in 1985 King took on David Burnside, the combative Ulster Unionist. Under Burnside, the PR machine, with a potent mixture of good staff work and free flights for journalists, won over the press and helped the successful privatisation, which eventually came in 1987. In King's 12 years BA turnover more than doubled, from just over £2 billion in 1981 to more than £4 billion in 1992.
Profits in the same period went from a loss of £140 million to a profit of £434 million, though they fell back in 1993 to £185 million.
The improvement was matched by a huge change in perception. BA became a symbol of the success of Thatcherite privatisation and a business-school model of corporate turnround.
King's gruff but flamboyant style embroidered the myth. When he came to London his trademark was a converted London taxi with one of the first car phones. He relished the company of celebrities and politicians and kept close relations with a handpicked group of journalists. He was a director of the Daily Telegraph.He became a life peer in 1983.
Competition in the air industry was fierce, and King's management style took few prisoners. In 1984 he won a huge lobbying effort to stop plans to hand some of BA's treasured Heathrow landing slots to British Caledonian (BCal) and other airlines, and in 1987 took an even sweeter victory when BA took over BCal inspite of concerns about competition. But the bigger strategic prizes of international links with airlines in the US and Belgium were thwarted.
Competition from Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic was a persistent irritant to King. In 1991 the rivalry broke into open warfare when Branson accused BA of a dirty-tricks campaign. After repeated denials by BA, a libel suit by Virgin in January 1993 alleging smear stories, passenger-poaching and document-shredding ended with an apology and the payment of damages by BA. King agreed to bring forward his retirement, but had the consolation of being appointed BA's president.
He leaves his second wife and three sons, and a daughter from his first marriage.
John Leonard King, Baron King of Wartnaby: born August 29th, 1918; died July 12th, 2005