New chairman for business forum

A LEADING lobby group for small business, for years a bastion of the Conservative Party, has a Labour Party donor as its new chairman. Len Collinson has been appointed to head the Forum of Private Business (FPB).

Many of its 27,000 members are traditional Tory supporters, but with the Conservatives still some way from power, the forum appears to want stronger links with Labour. FPB Chief executive Nick Goulding said: 'In the Seventies and Eighties the forum was more closely aligned with the Tories than with Labour in policy terms, which is more a reflection of where Labour was than where we were.'

Collinson, who became a director of the forum in 1994, gave more than £6,000 to Labour last year. He runs Collinson Grant, a Manchester-based management consultancy. He succeeds the forum's evangelical founder Stan Mendham, who set up the FPB in 1977 after receiving a 'Christian calling'.

Insiders say Mendham and his wife Brenda repeatedly sought divine guidance in the conduct of the forum's affairs. When the issue of a successor to Mendham was once raised at a board meeting, she told them that the date of her husband's retirement 'was a matter for God'.

Earlier this year, Mendham startled colleagues by announcing that he had been 'called' to sack Goulding - the man to whom he had handed day-to-day control in 2000. But by May, Mendham had seen the light and was ready to stand down. And then in an unorthodox tribute to Goulding, he said: 'I recognise and applaud Nick's great strengths. But he does not need any shadows of the past hanging over him. He needs to be free to develop FPB.

'Brenda and I are taking a sabbatical to determine our future roles. But as an inventor I can't stop trying to improve things around me. I'll be back.'