The Times, Monday 16th November 2015
Sailing into battle on behalf of the City
Martin Waller meets the scion of a nautical family who has taken
the helm as the 688th lord mayor of London.
But for an opportunely timed bout of scurvy, Jeffrey Evans would
not have taken over on Friday as the 688th lord mayor of London.
As it is, he is the first Lord Mayor in almost 40 years to have come
out of the shipping industry.
Lord Mountevans, 67, has spent his career at Clarksons, the
world’s biggest shipbroker, where he remains a board member.
Unlike earlier lord mayors, such as his immediate predecessor, the
banker Alan Yarrow, he is not prominent in financial services
circles. “A bit of an unknown,” one insider in that world says. “He
will need to demonstrate his credentials.”
The new lord mayor points out, however, that his chosen
profession sits at the heart of the City. “Shipping works with banks,
private equity, venture capital and quoted companies.” Clients may
be from anywhere, choosing to come to the UK to use the centuries
of expertise built up at companies such as Clarksons.
As for the scurvy, the baronetcy was created for his grandfather,
Edward, later admiral, Evans, in 1945. He had accompanied Scott
to the Antarctic, but, falling ill with the condition, was sent back.
The rest of the expedition, of course, perished.
Educated at the Nautical College, Pangbourne, Lord Mountevans
should have followed his grandfather, father and uncles into the
Royal Navy, but his eyesight was deemed not good enough to
command ships. He toyed with joining the Royal Marines,
“smashed myself up playing rugby” and went to Cambridge.
He retains strong links with the senior service and is a trustee of
the White Ensign Association, which provides financial and other
advice to seamen. He was approached recently to become an
honorary commander in the Royal Naval Reserve, a post that
involves training at Dartmouth and affiliation to a ship of the line.
His assumption of the mayoralty means he becomes the admiral of
the Port of London, another honorary title.
His father married a Norwegian and he speaks the language. Lord
Mountevans was actually born in Gothenburg, Sweden, where his
father worked for ICI after the Second World War. After
Cambridge he spent six months with Norsk Hydro, one of
Norway’s biggest companies, before joining Clarksons. At the
shipbroker, he had “a ringside seat in globalisation over the last 40
years”, gravitating towards the shipping of gases, particularly
ammonia, “the raw material for manufacturing nitrogen fertilisers,
which are a key part in feeding the world’s population”.
Given that naval background, it seems appropriate to ask about the
controversy that blew up in the week he took office, when Lord
West of Spithead, the former first sea lord, said it was “highly
likely” that he would resign the Labour whip if the party opted for
unilateral nuclear disarmament. Lord Mountevans had been on
HMS Belfast with the former first sea lord during the
Remembrance Day ceremonies. “I think as a retired admiral he is
entirely entitled to express an opinion,” he says.
The lord mayor of London is one of the less well understood jobs in
the Square Mile. Most associate the role with richly decorated
robes of office and arcane, Ruritanian rituals.
“Very little time is spent in exotic clothing,” Lord Mountevans says.
“It’s a very small part of what we do.” What it does involve is a
gruelling year-long round of foreign trips banging the drum for the
City and UK financial services and endless meetings with visiting
dignitaries here, eight, nine or ten a day, and an estimated 800 or
so speeches. “They say that there’s no job in the world which has
more speeches than this one. It’s a very high-octane existence.” He
admits to liking the trappings of office, too, including Saturday’s
Lord Mayor’s Show, the 800th, when the new man or woman
travels around the capital to show themselves to the populace.
A less welcome tradition is defending the City and its role in the
financial crisis. Large areas of the City were not implicated, he
says, including shipping. “It was very small numbers [of people],
but the damage they did was tremendous.”
It is traditional for lord mayors to adopt several charities to
promote in their year in office. His are JDRF, which supports
research into type one diabetes. There are, he says, about 400,000
sufferers from the disease in the UK, about the same number as
those working for the City of London. The other is, appropriately,
the Sea Cadets. He is president of the City of London branch.
Lord Mountevans inherited the title on the unexpected death last
year, at of 71, of his brother Broke, named after the destroyer their
grandfather commanded in the First World War. He was elected
this summer to sit as a crossbench hereditary peer in the House of
Lords. That crossbencher status reflects the fact that the
Corporation of London, and its lord mayor, are resolutely nonpolitical. The mayor is also expected to avoid controversy. His
tenure in office, though, almost certainly will coincide with a
referendum on the UK’s role within the European Union.
Lord Mountevans sticks to the City line on this one. “Our
stakeholders are very clear they want to remain part of the single
market,” he says. “We would like this to be resolved. The City likes
certainty.”
His next job, after the show, will be preparing for his first big
speech, at the Guildhall on November 16. He expects to focus on
the City’s ability to innovate and on its resilience. He mentions the
350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London, which falls within
his year in office, and the City’s recovery so quickly after that
catastrophe. For the latest occupant of a role that dates back to
1189, those centuries of history are never far from the mind.”