Bland cooks up a recipe to get BT off the hook

Business Profile: Former BBC chairman has helped BT cut debts, but the share price is still a worry

It's hard to imagine Sir Christopher Bland, the chairman of the telecoms giant BT, in anything but corporate mode, let alone an apron. But he is a big fan of the leapingsalmon.com website that will deliver all the raw ingredients for a gourmet meal that you cook up yourself.

Cooking is more than just a passion for Sir Christopher. He is the major shareholder in the foodie website www.foodndrink. co.uk, run by his brother Godfrey, and is also chairman of Leith's School of Food & Wine, in which he has a 70 per cent shareholding. He even went on a cookery course three years ago. "Yes, every Tuesday night for 12 weeks."

His relaxed mood is a far cry from the stressful situation Sir Christopher inherited when he stepped down as chairman of the BBC to take over at BT from Sir Iain Vallance in May last year. The company was in a financial mess with debts of nearly £30bn. It is also a far cry from the defensive Sir Christopher you'll find in front of shareholders at the annual meeting and is at odds with his fearsome reputation.

Life at BT is clearly much calmer today. This weekend he is off to his vineyard in Gascony to harvest the grapes from his 0.7 hectare plot. "There's enough work for four middle-aged couples for a day," he says. If he's lucky, apparently, it will produce 1,200 to 1,500 litres of wine.

Furthermore, his office at BT Centre in St Paul's, the only office he has these days, benefits from a personal touch – kitted out with some of the works of the British engraver and sculptor Eric Gill that he collects. One, in particular, stands out. A stone sculpture of a nude couple, that would be slightly risqué if it weren't "art", sits just to the left of his PC. "They're dancing," he says, laughing.

"Things are going well," he admits but notes there is "one significant exception". He is referring to the BT share price, which has fallen from around 416p when he joined to 175p today.

Sir Christopher invested £2.3m of his money into the company and, he calculates, his shares are now worth more like £1.2m. "That's pretty nasty," he says, pondering the paper loss.

Despite the collapse in value of telecoms shares across the board, he is still slightly nonplussed. "BT is a much stronger business today than it was 18 months ago," he says.

"Do I regret it [buying stock]? No, I don't because I think it [the price] will recover but in terms of investment timing," he says, starting to laugh, "I think it wasn't the perfect moment."

But however much he "really" enjoys life at BT, you can't help but suspect that the company's share price is a large part of what still motivates him. "The share price has fallen relentlessly since I arrived," he says. "That's partly because of the disillusionment with telecoms stocks ... but that's not much consolation to investors in BT including me."

The 64-year-old is clear that BT will almost certainly be his last big project. "You shouldn't forecast how long you intend to stay ... but I'll stay as long as I'm healthy and doing a good job and the board agrees. Whether that's much longer than three to four years, I doubt," he says.

He is also on something of a mission to correct the perception that BT was slow to open up its so-called local loop, to allow other operators to compete, and that this slowness caused financial problems for many of them.

It is here that he starts to get flustered, if not slightly angry. "Is that our fault? Excuse me. I'm awfully sorry ... but the local loop has been unbundled for the whole of last year and the truth is it's not a very economical proposition for them."

And what of the recent rumours of a BT profit warning? "The suggestion of a profit warning is nonsense." Should BT be broken up? "To break up BT would be disastrous for the customers and for BT."

So what about his comments in a Sunday newspaper, earlier this year, which seemed to suggest he was keen to explore the possibility of turning BT into a broadcaster?

"No, no, no. I did not write that column. I did not say BT is going to become a broadcaster. The headline said chairman says BT could become broadcaster but that was some sub-editor wilfully misinterpreting what I said.

"I was also chairman of NFC but is BT about to go into logistics? Might it become a cookery school?" he says, referring to his Leith's role.

Does he miss life in the broadcast world? He says he misses the people at the BBC but does not "look back and wish I was still there". And while he gives his time at the BBC a "nine out 10", and his stint at LWT, where he was chairman for 11 years, a "10 out of 10", he stresses that BT also gets a nine "so far". "I've always enjoyed work and if I haven't enjoyed it, I'd have stopped doing it. And I really enjoy BT. If it ceased to be enjoyable then I would go and do something else."

There is one job that did not score highly. "I had a terrible year in the City working in corporate finance in 1973-74. And that got a two out of 10. I was hopeless," he admits. Was he fired? "We agreed it was time for me to go. I think I did get fired," he says. A holiday job working at the airline BKS Air Transport cannot have been easy either. "That largely involved going into a little booth and saying BKS Air Transport regret to announce the delay of two hours in the flight...," he recalls. As a child, he saw little of his parents. His father, who worked in the oil industry and travelled the world, could not afford to make the trip home too often. Consequently, Sir Christopher, who was born in Japan in 1938, did most of his growing up at boarding school in Yorkshire and in Ireland. Apart from cooking, his other great passion is fencing. He fenced for Ireland at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome.

But he has also had his failures. "I failed to stop LWT being taken over by Granada. That was a real disappointment," he says. Some of the early vintages from his Gascony vineyard also ended up down the sink, he says with a smile.

So if BT is his last big job and all that remains there is to fix the share price and ensure it continues to meet its targets, is he bothered that "beleaguered BT" has been replaced with the label "boring BT"?

"A certain amount of boredom, as Ben [Verwaayen, BT's chief executive] has suggested, isn't too bad in an organisation that has had arguably too much excitement," he says. "One of my objectives was to take the adjectives beleaguered or troubled from in front of BT and they've gone."

SIR CHRISTOPHER BLAND RINGING THE CHANGES

Age: 64.

Pay: £500,000 as chairman of BT. His pay as chairman of Leith's and as a senior adviser to Warburg Pincus is not disclosed.

Education: Sedbergh School, Yorkshire, followed by a degree in modern history at Queen's College, Oxford.

Career record: Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors from 1996 to 2001. Chairman of NFC (National Freight Consortium, now Exel) in 1994 to 2000. Chairman of LWT, 1983-94. Chairman of the printers and publishers Sir Joseph Causton and Sons 1977-85. He also been chairman of Century Hutchinson Group and of Life Sciences International, as well as a director of Storehouse and National Provident Institution. He has also held the post of deputy chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority and was also chairman of its complaints review board.

Interests: Fishing, winemaking and collecting the works of Eric Gill.