WHEN Richard Macdonald closes his office door behind him for the final time next Friday afternoon, he can do so with the quiet sense of satisfaction which comes of knowing that a difficult and demanding job has been well done.
After his 13 years as NFU Director General, he leaves behind him an organisation which is respected, financially strong and, if anything, rather more influential than it was when he took over. And that is a remarkable achievement when you consider the forces and circumstances that have been ranged against him. At the start of his reign, it was the BSE crisis. That was followed in rapid succession by the election of a Government which was profoundly out of sympathy with rural Britain, a collapse in farm incomes and the worst outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in modern times.
And while all the time coping with those external pressures, he master-minded an organisational revolution within the NFU, which saw services hived off into a separate company, dozens of committees swept away, the head office moved from London to Stoneleigh and a huge turnover of staff.
Of course, Richard didn't do all of this on his own. As essentially the NFU's chief civil servant, he always had an elected President alongside him, although it has to be said that for several of the most difficult years, the President in question didn't so much share the burden, as add to it, sometimes inordinately. That has changed since Peter Kendall's election in 2006. The NFU now has a front man with charisma and credibility, albeit one whose all-embracing interpretation of his role does sometimes exert pressures of its own.
I first met Richard shortly after he joined the NFU in the late 1970s. The controversy over the ploughing of heather moorland on Exmoor was boiling away furiously at the time, and Richard was charged with devising a formula for determining how much compensation should be paid in loss of profits to the farmers who, voluntarily, agreed to forego their right to manage their land as they saw fit. He did it so successfully that the Exmoor management agreements became a blueprint for the compensation arrangements in the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act which – eventually – brought peace, not only to Exmoor, but to all the other farming and conservation battlegrounds, including the Somerset Levels and Dartmoor.
I was going to write that "thereafter our careers ran more or less in parallel," but that wouldn't be strictly true. Despite being five years younger, Richard was always at least one step ahead. He beat me to the job of Devon County Secretary in 1985, and did it again in 1989 when the NFU was regionalised and we both applied for the post of South West Regional Director. No doubt he would have beaten me in the contest for Director General as well, had I wanted the job, but I was happy in the South West and, besides, by then I'd got the message.
I suppose that his greatest achievement during his time in the Westcountry was resolving the "lead in feed" crisis in 1990. Around 1,700 farmers were affected by the contamination of a boatload of maize gluten, of whom 1,300 joined what was one of the very first class actions in British legal history, which Richard was largely instrumental in coordinating. It resulted in compensation payments totalling almost £5 million, and provided ample confirmation of two of Richard's key strengths – attention to detail and capacity for hard work. But it was when he became Director General, shortly before the BSE crisis broke in March 1996, that he had the opportunity to demonstrate what is perhaps his greatest attribute, which is his strategic appreciation of the bigger picture. Together with the President at the time, Sir David Naish, and the late Ian Gardiner, Richard played a key role in persuading the Government to introduce the Over Thirty Month Scheme. It
was costly, it went much further than the science dictated, and it was roundly criticised, not least from the South West, for being overkill. Yet it was that measure – and the ability it provided to reassure consumers categorically that British beef in the food chain could not possibly be carrying the BSE agent – which was the foundation on which confidence in the industry was eventually re-built. Similarly, when Tony Blair's New Labour was elected with a huge majority in 1997 and an unspoken mandate to "cut the farming lobby down to size," it was Richard, the ultimate pragmatist, who saw the value of riding with the punches, of re-building rather than burning bridges and who eventually established a friendly and constructive relationship with Labour Ministers, up to and including Tony Blair himself. That was to prove vitally important during the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis when, notwithstanding the prevailing chaos and incompetence, the Government
did at least listen to the NFU and try to do its best by the industry. And it was the same story with the 2007 outbreak and Gordon Brown. Within the NFU, Richard will be remembered as the Director General who streamlined most of its committees out of existence and moved the head office from London to Stoneleigh. It was a huge upheaval, which involved the loss of over 80 per cent of HQ staff over a two-year period, but at the end of it, the organisation could boast a state-of-the-art building, on a site which had cost it nothing, in a strategic location and with a staff who, if they lacked experience, more than made up for it in enthusiasm and team spirit. Richard Macdonald's supreme achievement was to take the NFU forward, during an era when it might easily have been destroyed. His successor, Kevin Roberts, has much to live up to, but the best-possible platform from which to start.
Anthony Gibson is a freelance writer and may be contacted at
anthony.gbsn@googlemail.com
Source: westernmorningnews.co.uk
Back to News Headlines