Stephen Byers - the railways' hero?

TAKING on the transport job was Stephen Byers' chance for redemption. In his two-and-a-half years as Trade and Industry Secretary, he had lumbered from one disaster to another, stopping only to execute a number of inelegant U-turns.

His appointment as Transport Secretary after the General Election last June afforded him the chance to prove that he was not a ditherer. And he did so with this month's raid on Railtrack, forcing it into administration. He acted fast and could have emerged as the hero of the commuting classes.

Instead, he has managed to attract opprobrium from an unlikely band of allies - Railtrack, its shareholders, the big City investors that the Government badly needs to keep on side if its beloved public-private partnership programme is to remain viable, and the Treasury. It is quite an achievement.

Byers' discomfort - and he has already started to backtrack on several of his early assertions - was increased by the disclosure that he was being advised by Jo Moore, who sent the now-infamous e-mail an hour after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, suggesting that it was a good moment to release bad news. The Secretary of State remains supportive of his aide.

The bespectacled former polytechnic lecturer has an extraordinary ability to get into trouble - an ability fully demonstrated by his record at the Department of Trade and Industry. Byers faced the job of sorting out the crisis at Rover when BMW decided to offload its British subsidiary-putting tens of thousands of jobs in the Midlands in jeopardy. He deserved sympathy and got it - until it emerged that Byers and his officials at the DTI had failed to pick up early warning signs that the Germans were planning to abandon Rover.

Early in his tenure, he declared that the Government would not prop up failing industries. Byers pledged to support only businesses that had a 'real future' - and then gave £100m to deep coal mining, a sector that few observers would pick as one of tomorrow's winners. He also doled out money to struggling industries such as potteries and textiles.

To make matters worse, Byers is believed to have been involved in the shambolic handling of a £1bn order to build and manage six roll-on, roll-off ferries for the Ministry of Defence. That ended with most of the order going overseas under the Private Finance Initiative, only for two to be placed with Harland & Wolff on totally different terms to keep the struggling Belfast yard afloat.

In the words of one business leader: 'He listens, but he tries to be all things to all people and he's being squeezed between No 10 and the Treasury.' This was amply demonstrated in his attempt to blunt the public outcry over excessive pay for directors. He had flagged his plans to 'fast track' part of the Company Law Review to stop huge payments for failure in the boardroom.

An announcement was expected in spring 2001, but spring became summer and summer turned into autumn. In the end, action was taken only when Patricia Hewitt replaced him.

Byers, clearly in the shadow of Peter Mandelson, his go-getting predecessor at the DTI, was cruelly dubbed by his then Tory shadow David Heathcoat-Amory as a NIMTOF - Not In My Time Of Office. Even when he took action, it backfired. Most spectacularly, Byers was the Government's chief flag waver in the Rip-Off Britain campaign, which gave the pretext for a thorough investigation of supermarket pricing. But the inquiry effectively found the supermarkets not guilty of rigging prices and exploiting suppliers.

He announced a plan to crack down on the privatised utilities - then stripped his proposed bill of clauses relating to water and telecoms; only gas and electricity were covered. His struggle to set up a Universal Bank - a scheme that was originally designed to kill two birds with one stone by providing cheque accounts for the less well-off and keeping alive the Post Office network - was disaster-prone.

To be fair however, the Treasury-always hated the scheme and did little to prevent Byers appearing ham-fisted over the issue. The bank is struggling to be born and many in the industry predict - with few outward signs of sorrow - that the infant will prove sickly indeed.

It may simply be that misfortune and misunderstanding are dogging Byers. But a senior industrialist pinpoints the problem more closely. 'The Chancellor has identified him as a weak ministerial target,' he said. 'Let's face it, the man who controlled industrial policy was not Byers - it was Gordon Brown in the Treasury.' It looks as though things are unchanged at his new ministry.

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