In for the kill at Rentokil

FOR the better part of 10 years, Sir Clive Thompson was known as 'Mr 20%' because year in year out he pushed up Rentokil's profits by that much.

But today, after his ousting as chairman, there is barely that much of his reputation left.

Those wielding the knife, led by replacement Brian McGowan - the long-time business partner of Sir Nigel Rudd at Williams, and before that at Sir Jock Mackenzie's London and Northern conglomerate - deliver a pretty brutal assessment of Thompson's recent time in the chair.

Rentolkil Initial today issued a major profits warning. The background is that it faces a raft of problems and the non-executives' assessment was that the company was going in the wrong direction.

They concluded it would not get through the problems without a change of emphasis and style. In the polite tones of a Cantos statement, McGowan stopped short of calling Thompson a control freak, a bully or a man who, when he moved up from chief executive to chairman, found it impossible to give up the reins.

Indeed, such assessments may be unjust. His golfing partner - the Evening Standard's market reporter Mickey Clark - certainly thinks so, but, rightly or wrongly, some people might infer them. There is a distinct feeling, to paraphrase a line from The Godfather, that, 'this is not business, it's personal'.

There is irony, too, that the deed should be done the morning after the CBI's annual dinner, because it is surely yet another example of the curse of that body. Those who have been its president in recent times - Sir Iain Vallance, then of British Telecom, Lord Marshall of British Airways, Thompson himself - always seem to find something nasty happening in the business while they have been grandstanding.

It is also surely confirmation that, more often than not, Derek Higgs was right when he said it was a mistake for chief executives to become chairman of the same company.

Euro message

WE HAVE been waiting for months for a Government minister to start making the case for Britain's active membership of the European Union and last night it happened.

Responding to a thinly-veiled Eurosceptic speech from CBI president Sir John Egan, who recited the usual list of things that should not be in the European constitution, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw neither equivocated nor minced words.

Membership of the EU was vital to Britain's interests, he declared. Engagement with Brussels and full participation in the workings of the EU was essential if Britain's voice was to be heard and it was to succeed in building alliances to promote its competitiveness agenda.

Majority voting was not necessarily against British interests and indeed had been used by Britain to promote reform of the Common Agricultural Policy against French wishes.

Rules passed by Brussels and enforced by the European Court were not all a foreign plot to rob Britain of its sovereignty. The court worked for us too in forcing other member States to abide by European rules - and to stop, for example, the illegal French ban on British beef.

The momentum of the Lisbon agreement with the goal of making the European market the world's most competitive economy by 2010 must be maintained, as must continued liberalisation of the market in services.

There was much more in that vein, but the 1,400 CBI members and guests at the Grosvenor House Hotel gave him a fair hearing and his message struck a chord with most of the more serious businessmen.

What Straw alluded to but did not develop was the argument that the accession of 10 new member countries to the EU changes its dynamic.

Former European Commissioner Lord Tugendhat, now chairman of Lehman in Europe, is one of those who believes the days of the French-German axis running the Union in their narrow interest are drawing to a close.

Having rejected communism, the new members from eastern Europe are inspired by the American free market model of capitalism rather than the social market theories that sometimes appear to preoccupy Brussels.

His thesis is that there is now a great opportunity for Britain actively to get involved in Europe, cultivate new members, win their support and together go forward to shape the European agenda. The danger is that given the relative absence of adult discussion in this country about what is good as well as what is bad about the EU, other preoccupations will come to the fore and the chance will be lost again.

So far, Prime Minister Tony Blair has failed to persuade us to share his vision of Britain in Europe. Perhaps Jack Straw's comments last night mark the beginning of a genuine effort by the Government to lead rather than avoid the debate.