BT could have been a dull utility but after this week, the sky’s the limit

My Week

In his time as chairman of BT, Sir Christopher Bland would regularly pull a dog-eared scrap of paper from his pocket with a theatrical flourish.

It was the to-do list he drew up when he arrived at the company in 2001. Much of it was ticked off in the early months of his tenure: demerge the mobile business, sell Yellow Pages, launch a bumper rights issue, find a new chief executive.

BT was in terrible shape in those days, having racked up huge debts from an overseas acquisition spree. Many of the tasks Bland had listed were written down for him by angry shareholders.

After the week BT has had, I wonder what chief executive Gavin Patterson’s to-do list looks like now. The last few days haven’t been exactly quiet. Thursday: seal return to mobile market by paying £12.5bn for EE. Friday: go head-to-head with Sky in the auction for Premier League football rights.

It has been a smart turnaround. There was a time when BT’s future as a dull utility beckoned. Much of the action was in mobile, and broadband customers were being signed up by Sky and TalkTalk at a rate of knots. The greatest value was in its copper network that carried everyone else’s voice and data traffic – and even that was being nicked for scrap as commodity prices boomed.

Now BT has various growth drivers, but I doubt the story ends there. Sky has shown that sport is a powerful tool for signing up customers, but many pay-TV businesses have gone further than that. Take a look across the Atlantic at Comcast, which owns NBC, one of the main broadcast networks. The equivalent here would be for BT to buy ITV, an asset that Sky and Virgin Media have sparred over in the past. Tony Ball, the former Sky boss once in the running to lead ITV, sits on the BT board. Doubtless he will have a view about what should come next on the ambitious Patterson’s to-do list.

Pessina has as much right as anyone to put boot in

It was no surprise that Stefano Pessina was the businessman to spark the backlash against Labour that spiralled into a row over party political funding. Pessina is always good value: a boss unafraid to air his views instead of glancing timidly at his handler – as some do – to check they are not overstepping the mark. He is divisive too: either a corporate alchemist who rescued a declining Boots or a tax-avoiding tycoon, depending on your view.

The Italian was just saying what many business leaders I talk to are thinking: Labour’s interventionist stance has yet to win over many fans in the boardroom. And Pessina has as much right to speak out as anyone. Though Alliance Boots’ domicile may have been in Switzerland – although it is on the move to the US as its takeover by Walgreens completes – thousands of his staff have stayed put in Britain.

What he has over most politicians is his ability to take the long-term view. It took Pessina five years to seal the merger of his distribution business Alliance UniChem with Boots, and he hunted for a decade for the right US partner. At 73, don’t bet against him still being around to opine on the next generation of party leaders, long after Miliband and Cameron have moved on.

The finance gap is nothing new, so why is it still there?

Political battle will be rejoined next week as Vince Cable, Ed Balls and William Hague all speak at the annual conference of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC).

John Longworth, the director-general, has a bee in his bonnet about finance, which will crop up in his address. If small companies can’t access working capital other than by selling equity, then they will never become large companies. The same goes for access to export finance, which explains why most entrepreneurs concentrate on selling at home.

It all sounds depressingly familiar. The so-called “Macmillan gap” of finance for SMEs is a term coined in 1931. So why hasn’t anyone worked out how to close it yet?

CBI’s next 50 years must be an era of transparency

Another day, another lobby group. I was asked to speak at the Confederation of British Industry’s staff conference on Monday. It is marking its 50th birthday this year and wanted to hear an external view of how the organisation is seen.

The CBI has been at pains to shift its emphasis from being a voice for big business to a voice for all business. It has had some success campaigning for fast-growing, medium-sized “gazelle” companies – long the preserve of the BCC. But John Cridland, the director-general, has challenges, because tiny start-ups have wildly different requirements to multinationals.

The risk of trying to speak up for the lowest common denominator is that the message becomes diluted. It is why Business for Britain has gained such traction for its campaign for a new relationship with Europe. We have seen the fragmentation of the political landscape – I wonder if the same is happening among business groups?

The CBI is still the largest and has the ear of ministers. But to shore up its reputation, it should look again at its own transparency. The detail of how it is funded and who its members are should inform the path it takes for the next 50 years.