Profile

We’re simple folk out here in the country. Meet a bloke who has the word ‘Professor’ in front of his name and we naturally think of some amnesiac academic who solves a couple of quadratic equations while chatting to his fellow passengers on the bus.

Professor Sir Richard Sykes, rector of Imperial College, and the ultimate driving force behind the Wye Concordat, is not that man. The son of a Yorkshire carpenter, Sykes put himself through night school in order to gain scientific qualifications. His talents were not confined to the academic world however. In 1972 he joined Glaxo and, except for a five year period in the US, stayed with the company until taking the rectorship of Imperial in 2002. In 1993 then simple Professor Sykes became the chief executive and started to show the kind of hunger for growth and power normally more associated with aggressive businessmen than bright academics.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are many unsolved puzzles surrounding the hazy inception of the Wye Concordat, and few people willing to put their head above the parapet to bring some clarity to this foggy tale. Funnily enough, some of those who know more than any about this story have little public profile at all, though behind the scenes they appear to wield very considerable power.

Take Mr David Brooks Wilson, for example, who goes under the modest title of ‘director of estates’ for Imperial College. Most of us would think that someone with that kind of job description is essentially some sort of property manager. Not the bloke to phone when you see a fence has blown down exactly, but the one who gets the bill after it’s fixed. And there you would be very wrong indeed, for Mr Brooks Wilson is a powerful and key figure in this whole story, as you can guess from the way he tends to get copied into virtually every important e-mail from the local authorities involved.

Read the rest of this entry »