The past few weeks have been a fairly epic period for major food and drink industry developments. One that has attracted less comment is the typically measured and discreet announcement in which National Farmers’ Union chief Terry Jones gave notice that he would leave his post in 12 months’ time.
He will leave big boots to fill. Very quietly, Jones has steered the industry’s largest and most powerful representative organisation through a decade of tumultuous, hugely controversial events, including Brexit and Covid.
NFU members have faced regular and potentially genuinely calamitous threats to their livelihoods. While many of those challenges remain, it owes much to Jones’ wisdom and leadership that the NFU and its members regularly live to fight another day.
National figures
Of course the NFU, unlike some of its organisational peers, is a full-blown democracy. So the triumvirate at the top the organisation – president, deputy president and vice president – are democratically elected, along with many other leadership positions including sectional chairs and county representatives.
There is keen, often noisy and aggressive, competition for these positions. The president is the key front-of-house voice of the NFU. Office bearers like Minette Batters – and now Tom Bradshaw – quickly become national figures.
Whereas someone like the Food & Drink Federation’s CEO Karen Betts – or her more gobby predecessor – is more like a trade union leader, Jones’ role has more of the civil service permanent secretary about it. The NFU has huge resources: 45,000 members, 750 staff offering a wide range of professional and commercial services, offices across England and Wales, and over a century of history.
Yet its access to government and civil servants at all levels, together with well-developed relationships with all the key players in the industry, is what gives the NFU significant power, soft and hard. That is why it wields such influence on the course of events, in the interests of its members.
In the seven years I ran the FDF, I quickly developed deep respect for that influence. More importantly, I came to appreciate the skill with which Jones advised and managed successive NFU presidents through the continuous controversies they faced.
And those presidents were very, very different. Batters has become a national treasure, a brilliant communicator who will shine for years to come. Bradshaw is more cerebral, yet impressive and impactful. Further back, the quietly dignified Meurig Raymond’s navigation of the early stages of Brexit owed very much to Jones’ wise advice.
Reading the industry
That wisdom marks out the ebullient Jones. Although still only in his early fifties, he already has a lifetime of immersion in farming on which to draw. His home is a Cheshire farm run by his wife.
Alongside six years in commercial life – including a spell with commodities giant Cargill – he has notched up almost 20 years (in two spells) with the NFU. That included working closely with the charismatic former NFU president Peter Kendall, perhaps the biggest – and most effective – of beasts to inhabit the organisation. He also spent five years with the FDF and Provision Trade Federation.
Jones draws on all of this to read the topography of the industry better than anyone I know. He is also a most companionable colleague. He cares deeply about his people and for his members. He is an imposing figure, with a surprising lightness of touch.
I saw him at very close quarters during Brexit and Covid. Then, the ‘F4’ group of food industry organisations – NFU, BRC, UKHospitality and FDF – met weekly, sometimes daily, with successive secretaries of state including Michael Gove and George Eustice. None of us knew better than Jones which buttons to press to ensure that sensible things happened or – more importantly – to ensure really stupid ideas did not.
Few industry leaders have such reserves of common sense or a common touch. Fewer still are so thoroughly decent or such fun. Jones’ very big muddy boots will be extremely difficult to fill.
Ian Wright, partner at Acuti Associates
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