Alan Bristow

by Alan Bristow

  Next day I phone Charles Forte. ‘Nothing’s changed,’ I said.

  The rescheduled Annual General Meeting was held at the Albert Hall on 17 January 1986, and the few hundred shareholders who turned up could have fitted into the Connaught Rooms several times over. I was escorted to the meeting by my legal ‘minder’ from Linklaters, Don Williams, whose job it was to make sure I said nothing compromising, observed the requirements of the Chinese walls and avoided any suggestion of collusion. Don told me it would be preferable if I didn’t say anything at all. From the platform, Sir John Cuckney exhorted everyone to vote for the Sikorsky deal, which he said was the only real offer on the table. The Europeans, he said, had simply set out to sabotage Westland and kill off competition.

  ‘Don,’ I whispered, ‘I have to get up and speak. I can’t let these half-truths go on. He’s not telling outright lies, but he’s misrepresenting the truth.’

  Don shrugged his shoulders and I went down to the bank of microphones set out for shareholders to ask questions of the Board. ‘The Chairman does not seem to want to tell you the whole story,’ I said. I spoke for twenty minutes, picking holes in every point Cuckney had made and putting his claims into perspective. The Black Hawk was not a helicopter the British armed forces were interested in, I said, and the Westland Board were engaged in a single-minded pursuit of the wrong partner. I finished speaking and returned to my seat to the applause of shareholders. When it came to the vote, the Board motion was defeated. The merger with Sikorsky was off. Cuckney was outraged, and after that, there was no more ‘Alan’ and ‘John’.

  But the deal was not dead. Cuckney set about changing Westland’s Articles of Association so that a simple majority was all that was required to drive the deal through. Having done so, he called an Extraordinary General Meeting to vote on the issue. Less than a week after the Albert Hall meeting, Industry Secretary Leon Brittan was publicly identified as the ‘mole’ behind a dirty tricks campaign to discredit Michael Heseltine over Westland, and he too was forced to resign from Cabinet. Brittan had leaked to the press a letter from the Attorney General Patrick Mayhew to Michael Heseltine, but had edited it to make it look as though Mayhew was accusing Heseltine of being ‘economical with the truth’, an allegation that was totally false. As Brittan was clearing his desk, Sikorsky threw the rule book to the wind and began buying Westland shares at 150p and more. Anonymous buyers all over the world popped up to buy Westland shares at high prices, all of them picking up less than five per cent in order to avoid having to declare their holdings. Two nominee companies in Switzerland and others in Panama, Spain, France and Uruguay bought similar blocks of shares. At a later Stock Exchange inquiry, Cuckney described the buyers as a ‘fan club’ who wished Westland well. By the time the Extraordinary General Meeting came round on 12 February, he had changed the rules and built an unassailable pro-Sikorsky stockholder base, much of it anonymous. The meeting – held, appropriately, in the Connaught Rooms, where there was ample space for everyone – carried the Board’s motion in favour of Sikorsky by a margin of sixty-seven per cent to thirty-two per cent, and General Haig was granted his wish.

  For me, it was time to get out, and quickly. Sir Raymond Lygo and Lord Weinstock acquired my shares at 127.5p in order to protect the interests of BAe and GEC at Westland under the new regime. I sold at a small premium which did not justify my time and effort or the capital I’d put at risk, but because I retained rights issues and options I came out well ahead in due course. With two Cabinet ministers having been forced out, the Thatcher government wobbled but did not fall. It must have been a relief to Mrs Thatcher that despite the extraordinary circumstances, the truth had not come out.

  The aftershocks from the Westland Affair echoed for years. Apart from the Stock Exchange inquiry into the anonymous share dealings, which got nowhere, three separate Parliamentary Select Committees began investigating various aspects of the Westland saga. I was called before one of them, the Trade and Industry Select Committee, chaired by an MP called Kenneth Warren. I was briefed beforehand by Cranley Onslow and I took my legal minder with me. I was afforded none of the protection that allowed civil servants to decline to testify, which they did. Was it true, I was asked, that I had been offered a knighthood in return for selling my shares to Sikorsky? How on earth did they know that? It was true, and I said so.

  Who made the offer?

  ‘I’m not going to answer that,’ I said. ‘It’s totally irrelevant.’

  There was uproar. Warren threatened to have me called before the bar of the House of Commons for contempt. My counsel from Linklaters said I had to answer; I told him I would not. I suppose the committee was sick of being told by Number Ten and the Permanent Secretaries what they could do with their inquiry – here they had someone who didn’t enjoy the stonewall protection of the insider. The more I refused to answer, the greater the threats became. After the committee meeting, Cranley Onslow was sent to see me by the Chief Whip, John Wakeham. The message was grim. I could be jailed, and I faced an unlimited fine, if I continued to refuse to answer.

  Apart from having been on my payroll as the company lobbyist for years, Cranley was a good friend and a member of my shooting syndicate. ‘You’re in trouble, Alan,’ he said. ‘The Select Committee has tremendous powers over the layman. They can make you appear, and they can throw you in the Tower if you refuse to answer questions. There are precedents where journalists who refuse to reveal sources have been jailed. You don’t necessarily have to tell the truth, though.’

  I was somewhat taken aback at that remark.

  Onslow produced a document from his pocket. ‘I’ve got a letter here that will do the trick. In it, you apologise to the Select Committee. You say you’ve been informed by your legal advisers that the Select Committee has power to make you answer, but that you are prepared to disclose the names of those who offered you a knighthood only to the chief whip, John Wakeham, in strict confidence.’

  ‘How confidential is it?’ I asked.

  ‘You needn’t worry about that,’ he said. It’s private, it’ll go no further than the Chairman of the Committee. It’ll be swept under the carpet, and that’ll be the end of it.’

  ‘You’d better make sure of that,’ I said. I read his draft, corrected the grammar and signed it. At Onslow’s suggestion, in order to ensure security my chauffeur Brian Philpott delivered the letter personally into the hand of John Wakeham. The next day, the whole of the letter appeared verbatim in the Daily Telegraph.

  Charles Forte had read the paper by the time I called him that morning, and he cursed me up hill and down dale. I couldn’t get across to him the fact that it was all supposed to have been done in the strictest confidence, on the advice of Cranley Onslow, whom he knew quite well. He thought it was a deliberate breach of faith on my part. John King wasn’t quite so bolshy about it and gave me a chance to explain the circumstances. However, neither Lord Forte nor Lord King ever spoke to me again in their lives. They had fair reason to be annoyed, but they neither understood nor sympathised with my predicament at being threatened with imprisonment. I never found out how the Committee came to hear of the offer in the first place. Perhaps, as Cranley Onslow suggested, I should have lied to them. Detectives from Scotland Yard came to interview me about the offers of a knighthood, which was illegal under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925, but they did not interview Charles Forte, John King or Denis Thatcher, and the matter was quickly allowed to fade away.

  Despite having been in a privileged position in an extraordinary, exciting and historic political upheaval, I was as baffled as anyone about why there had been such determination in Number Ten to make sure the Sikorsky deal went through, and to kill off any counter-offer. It was not until the Farnborough Air Show later that year that the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. As a long-term buyer of Sikorsky helicopters I had been invited to the United Technologies chalet for lunch. The Sikorsky and UTC executives there – Harry Gray, Bob Daniel, Bill Paul – were all old
friends, and our relationship had been little affected by the Westland Affair. It was water under the bridge, but they were very unhappy. It had finally become clear to them that the sale of Black Hawks to the British military was a non-starter. Sir John Cuckney had kept the prospect alive in their minds long after he should have advised them it was never going to happen. They complained that Mrs Thatcher had sent Peter Levene, who’d ironically been hired by Michael Heseltine as head of procurement at the Ministry of Defence, to talk to their rivals McDonnell Douglas about purchasing the Apache helicopter. The mood in the chalet was downbeat.

  The head of the United Technologies delegation that day was General Alexander Haig, who’d been president and chief executive of UTC before taking leave of absence to become Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State. After he’d done his political duty he returned to United Technologies in 1983 with a deep-rooted dislike of Margaret Thatcher. As we sat down to lunch, I found Haig more than willing to unburden himself about Mrs Thatcher. He had been made to look a fool, he said, when he was shuttling back and forth between London and Buenos Aires trying to arrange an Argentine withdrawal from the Falkland Islands.

  ‘She said one thing when I left London, then when I got off the plane I found she’d said something totally different,’ he said. ‘I didn’t trust her. I trusted her at the start, but it didn’t work. She doth speak with a forked tongue.’

  Nonetheless, Haig said, he had personally been responsible for the biggest and riskiest contribution the Americans made to Britain’s victory, the provision of AWACS information on Argentine aircraft movements that made a major contribution to the British victory in the conflict. ‘The Argentines lost more than a hundred planes,’ Haig said. ‘Some of it was skill, some of it was luck, but mostly it was because we told your people exactly where they were.’

  Of Mrs Thatcher, Haig went on: ‘She might be two-faced, but she doesn’t forget a debt. So when UTC wanted Westland, it was payback time. I called in my marker. And she responded. She made sure we got it. UTC was looking for ways of getting in on the big deals the British were doing with Saudi Arabia. We looked at partnering with Short Brothers, but Westland was a better bet. I thought we could get Black Hawk on the order list, but all the time Mrs Thatcher was negotiating with McDonnell Douglas behind our backs for the Apache.’

  Relations between Sikorsky and the Thatcher government had clearly gone very sour. ‘There wouldn’t be a Westland if it wasn’t for Sikorsky,’ Haig said. ‘They’ve lived for years on Sikorsky licenses. Without the Black Hawk, they’re nothing.’

  For me, everything fell into place. Thatcher’s determination to give Westland to Sikorsky suddenly had logic to it. Haig had called in his debt, and she had paid it. The Prime Minister’s behaviour, baffling in the absence of Haig’s information, suddenly had an explanation. I reported the conversation later to Michael Heseltine, who was aghast. He’d had no knowledge of Haig’s phone call to Downing Street. Mrs Thatcher had simply demanded to be obeyed, with no reasons given. To my mind, Heseltine’s stand was a principled one. He had a genuine belief in the need for the Europeans to unite to prevent the Americans from ending up with a monopoly on defence helicopters.

  The outcome, however, was entirely as I had predicted. It cost the British taxpayer well over £100 million to give Westland to Sikorsky – more than £60 million went to pay the Indians to take the WG30, and £41 million in ‘launch aid’ was written off – and they never built a single Black Hawk. A demonstrator was brought over from America, but the government wasn’t interested and there was no export potential. Sikorsky never got to ride the Al Yamamah gravy train. The workforce at Yeovil was decimated, and Westland’s tortuous progress on the EH101 dragged on. One of the TGWU shop stewards at Westland, whom I knew, took the trouble to ring me up and say, ‘Mr Bristow, we thought you might like to know that we think we made a mistake not believing what you said. We were told Black Hawk would save Westland. We should have listened to you.’

  A few years later Sikorsky sold its share of Westland to GKN, who in turn sold it to Finmeccanica, owners of Agusta. Today it is called AgustaWestland, and as such is a semi-detached member of the European consortium. While the French, Germans and Italians are working under the banner of Eurocopter and producing efficient, market-leading helicopters, Westland relies on the EH101, which in true Westland style has never been exploited to the full. A Canadian order for 24 EH101s has been cancelled under dubious circumstances, with the Sikorsky S92 having been retrospectively chosen in its place. Some say the AgustaWestland set-up was already so mature that it really couldn’t be unwound into Eurocopter, but I would still like to see all European helicopter manufacturers co-ordinated under one banner, and Eurocopter’s as good a name as any. I think that what should have happened in 1986 will eventually come to pass, and Westland will become a full member of Eurocopter. It’s an evolution, not a revolution. The EH101 is the only three-engined helicopter in the western world that’s been made to work.

  The question remains whether a degree of openness and trust on Mrs Thatcher’s part would have avoided the Westland scandal. The Falklands War was unquestionably the most important event for Britain in the latter half of the twentieth century, making Thatcher’s industrial reforms possible and fixing for this country a place in the world which our size and economic clout would not justify. Had we lost in 1982, we would today be mired in industrial conflict at home and relegated to also-ran status abroad. It was vital not only to win, but to keep faith with those who helped us do so. How would Michael Heseltine have reacted if Mrs Thatcher had levelled with him, and he had understood her imperatives at the time? Was there something else Haig would have accepted instead of Westland? And would I have behaved differently, had I known? The question is moot.

  CHAPTER 24

  Briway

  For the first time since I took my unofficial leave of the merchant navy more than forty years before, I turned my back on aviation for my next business project. I was almost sixty years old at the time of the Westland Affair and some of my friends thought it might be a good time to retire; I had long since ceased to have to worry about money and I could have spent the rest of my life cruising the world on my yacht. But I simply can’t abide inactivity. I like nothing better than a full diary, obstacles to overcome and problems to grapple with. Briway Transit Systems was to provide these in full measure.

  In the late 1980s the government was talking up the need for automated driverless public transport systems to attack traffic congestion in city centres. A special section within the Department of Transport had been set up solely to deal with rapid transit systems and tramways. They pointed to examples abroad like Miami, Sydney, Strasbourg, Chicago, Lille, Jacksonville, Dijon, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Taipei, and of course the Japanese had half a dozen rapid transit systems. With street space at such a premium, it made no sense to put additional trams or light railways on it; elevated systems were what they wanted to see. I looked at the ‘people mover’ that had been constructed in Lille in 1983. It has started out small, with just a few kilometres of track, but it was so popular that it was extended three times and was carrying four million passengers a year.

  My airline and helicopter experience fitted me well for creating a city-centre rapid transit system. As with Bristows and BUA, the object was to move people as safely, efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, and with so much government backing and municipal interest there seemed to be almost limitless opportunities for growth. As far as design and manufacture was concerned, there were no established British players in the field. We were too late to bid for the Gatwick Airport project, which had already been awarded to Westinghouse who were building a monorail between the North and South Terminals. But schemes were being spoken of in Glasgow, Manchester, Southampton, Leeds, Bournemouth and a dozen other cities. I did an enormous amount of research, and after examining all the systems that existed in the world I decided I would create one that could run through a tunnel, elevated, or down in th
e street with the rest of the traffic, and could read oncoming vehicles with laser systems. It was very sophisticated and it incorporated all the safety systems that had been built into helicopters over the years; each car would have two motors, two battery chargers and two power control units and would be able to maintain at least two-thirds performance on one motor. I spent some time sounding out government ministers, civil servants and municipal leaders in cities that had been identified as suitable for rapid transit systems. Over the course of several meetings with Cecil Parkinson, who was then Secretary of State for Transport, Parkinson stressed how keen the government was to see a British counterpart to companies like Westinghouse, Alcatel and Siemens in the design and manufacturing field.

  In 1987 I formed Briway Transit Systems Ltd and began putting together a first-class team of designers and engineers. The first employee was Doug Eastman, who had been principal engineer at British Rail. General Manager John Baggs used to do the same job on the Tyneside Metro. Chief electronics engineer Peter Tapner came from the Ministry of Defence and structural engineer Steve Robins came from Rover cars. They headed a brilliant team, quite outstanding in the breadth of its knowledge and talent. Eventually we had forty-four employees working out of offices on my estate at Baynards, where we laid a test track and began building a prototype. The local council wouldn’t let me build a workshop so I had to remove all my horse-drawn carriages from Coxland to give the engineers a place to work. Just sixteen months and twenty-one days after the company was formed we had the prototype running on the test track. It was an exhilarating time, with everyone working long hours to turn the design drawings into working machinery, whatever the difficulties.

  The Briway system was revolutionary in many respects. The track was made up of two concrete strips either side of a central structure, which provided current, guidance and drainage. The car ran on standard pneumatic tyres, which made the vehicle much quieter than any tram or train, inside and out – in fact it measured just 55 db at seven metres when travelling at 80 kmh. The test track was 770 metres long and incorporated the maximum inclines and tightest bends the system would have to cope with in the real world. The corners were based on the dimensions of the circular rose garden outside my living room window – we started with a radius of eight metres and ultimately got it down to six metres, which was considered remarkable for a track system at the time. Driving the car was the world’s most powerful permanent magnetic traction motor using an AC 660V single phase system, which did away with the flashing and gapping problems inherent in DC systems. Fully loaded, the car could take a one-in-eight incline at up to 48 kph, and while we quoted a maximum speed of 80 kph, the prototype was capable of 100 kph. As well as duplex systems there were video monitors and intercoms for added safety. The front of the car was detachable so that in an emergency, the passengers could step out onto the track and walk to safety. Each car could hold sixty people in comfort, and with a maximum of seven cars connected we could move more than 13,000 passengers an hour in each direction along a single track. Where possible the track would be elevated to keep it clear of street-level activity, but the car could also operate with other traffic and pedestrians in the street, although some of the benefits of automation would be lost.