A modern morality tale: the Co-op raider

It was a movement founded on promises to take on capitalism and improve the living conditions of the British working man. But now the new man with the slick hairstyle and the sharp suit is promising to sweep away the old image of cloth caps and terraced streets forever.

Andrew Regan is the 31-year-old who wants to take the Co-operative Wholesale Society, one of the most important movements in the British class struggle, into a new era. Yet while Tony Blair and progressive trade union leaders are heralded as "modernisers" for sweeping away the cobwebs of outdated features of British socialism, Mr Regan has become the new demon in the eyes of the Labour Party. More than 50 Labour MPs have called for his bid to take control of large parts of CWS to be blocked.

On closer inspection it is not difficult to see why Mr Regan is so despised by the Labour members, 15 of whom are sponsored by the Co-op. He appears as an embodiment of Thatcherism, described by one commentator as "the mutant son of Gordon Gekko", who has emerged from a deep-freeze after being kept in storage since the mid-1980s.

In fact, Mr Regan has spent the last 12 years in a frenzy of business activity since setting up his first company at the age of 19. Born into a business family he boasts that while his teenage peers were getting drunk and having fun, "the only thing I ever wanted to do was run a public company".

Leaving school at 17, he was encouraged by his father Roger, the chairman of the kitchens and bathrooms group Spring Ram, to set up a household cleaning products firm. Seven years later he used the business to take control of Hobson, a listed company.

His interest in the Co-op appears to have had little to do with the principles on which the movement was founded.

Presiding over an impromptu board meeting which he called in a City wine bar, Regan decided on major expansion.

His partner Peter Hallett recalled: "We got together and said `Right this is the pool of money we have got we can either go for a number of small acquisitions or we can go for a Big Bertha."

The CWS was identified as a "Big Bertha" takeover.

The language was rather different from that used when 28 flannel weavers formed the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers in 1840 to sell grain, sugar and butter at fair prices from the first Co-op shop.

The movement spread across Britain and at its peak had 11 million members in 2,000 societies.

The co-operative societies, along with the trade unions and other socialist bodies, set up the Independent Labour Party in 1893, and the movements have been intertwined ever since.

Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, insisted on Co-op products being delivered to 10 Downing Street.

This was the organisation which Regan wanted to take over. When rumours first circulated of his pounds 1bn bid to buy up the Co-op, not everyone took him seriously. He was depicted as a Don Quixote figure tilting his lance at a windmill. Yet the Co-op bosses, who denounced him as an "asset-stripping middleman", were not so scornful. After all Regan had already bought a chunk of CWS in 1994 and sold it for a personal profit of pounds 2.7m.

Mr Regan, who lives in an elegant three-storey mansion in Kensington with his young wife and five children, is a fast, persuasive talker who has clearly won over several financial backers.

His charm may also have won him support from senior Co-op managers, two of whom were suspended on Thursday for serious breach of trust.

Yesterday a High Court was not so impressed, ordering Mr Regan to return any confidential CWS information that may have come into his possession. The decision in effect headed off his takeover bid.