Bob was earning £1.2m as boss of the AA — until he hit a colleague and was sacked. Read his painfully honest interview and decide if he’s a villain or a victim...
‘I can barely read a book. My memory’s gone’
‘I was under huge pressure . . . I was like a time bomb’
WHEN Bob Mackenzie became the boss of one of Britain’s most trusted brands — the Automobile Association — he was considered a very safe pair of hands. With an illustrious 40-year corporate career behind him, the boardroom legend arrived, pin-stripe suited, in 2014 with a ‘tough but fair’ reputation and an impressive track record in company takeovers and turnarounds.
He seemed just the person to head up the roadside assistance firm — dubbed ‘the fourth emergency service’.
So, Mr Mackenzie was the last person you’d expect to send shockwaves through the City with a career-ending ‘Jeremy Clarkson’ fist-flying meltdown in a posh hotel bar. But that, remarkably, is what happened last July.
Eight months ago Mr Mackenzie, 65, was fired from his £1.2 million-a-year post for gross misconduct after attacking the AA’s head of insurance, Mike Lloyd, 38, in the wood-panelled bar of the five-star Pennyhill Park Hotel, Surrey, after a day of strategy meetings.
Just as Clarkson was dropped by the BBC for allegedly punching a colleague in a fit of temper over the lack of a hot dinner after filming, so Mr Mackenzie was shown the door.
More humiliating still, the ‘almost comical’ episode was captured on the hotel’s CCTV cameras and Mr Mackenzie was compared in the Press — by someone who’d seen the footage — to ‘a kitten taking on a bulldog’.
‘I still feel deeply embarrassed and ashamed by the incident,’ says Mr Mackenzie in his first interview since his sacking. ‘It’s been devastating, not only for me, but for my wife Jane, who is mortified, and the whole family. I have very little recollection of what happened.’
Mr Mackenzie blames a build-up of severe stress and exhaustion, exacerbated by his type 2 diabetes and mixing alcohol with prescription drugs — which he’d taken that day to calm anxiety — for his breakdown.
‘Mike’s a lovely guy. We got on well and I really liked him. I’d been very vocal about him taking over from me as chief executive when I semi-retired,’ he says. ‘I was so embarrassed by what happened that I phoned him the next day to apologise which he very graciously accepted. There was a verbal handshake.
‘Police were never called and I thought that would be the end of it, but sadly it wasn’t. I feel completely destroyed.’
The toll on Mr Mackenzie could not be more evident. Thin, grey and fragile, he is ‘a husk’ of the corporate powerhouse he once was. It had been his long-held dream to take over the private equity-owned AA — founded in 1905 — having tried and failed to take over the rival RAC.
Birmingham born, the grammarschool educated son of a chemistry academic father and English literature lecturer mother, built his reputation as the CEO of National Car Parks, then Green Flag roadside assistance.
It was a crowning moment when, backed by heavy investors, he led a £4.4 billion buy-out, then floated the AA as a public company on the stock exchange in 2014. As executive chairman and chief executive Mr Mackenzie worked hard to try to meet targets and deliver results before his semi-retirement, pencilled in for January this year.
There were, he admits, unforeseen challenges and delays in installing a state-of-the-art IT system, and further strain when he broke his leg two years ago, but he’d still turn up for board meetings in a wheelchair.
Today, he physically shrinks as he speaks about his abrupt departure, supported by his property developer son Peter, 34, who describes his dad as his ‘hero’.
Mr Mackenzie says he was ‘deeply hurt’ when the AA announced his sacking on August 1 last year as he was being treated for stress, exhaustion and severe depression in a private psychiatric hospital.
Still not fully recovered, he says he’s on ‘quite a lot of medication’ to regulate his mood and sleep and doesn’t recognise the diminished, unwell person he’s become.
Married to chartered accountant Jane, 64, for 40 years, the father-offive and grandfather-of-three says his family remain worried for his health.
Having lost more than three stones, thanks to an alcohol-free regime and diet, his new retirement uniform of sports tops and jeans hang off his 6ft, 12st 6lb frame.
‘Ten-hour days, six or seven days a week, used to be the norm but now I can barely concentrate for an hour before having to lie down,’ Mr Mackenzie says.
‘I used to leap out of bed to catch the 5.40am train to London. I could skim-read documents and retain every fact and figure, now I can barely read a book. My memory’s gone.
‘My brain is sometimes like a spinning cylinder, thinking about ten or 20 things at once. When I talk, I ramble, so I spend my time hitting golf balls. I find it therapeutic.’
He still can’t bring himself to view the footage of his moment of madness, but tears mist in son Peter’s eyes as he describes it as ‘heartbreaking’ rather than comical.
‘He looks like an old man who is just flailing around with his arms,’ Peter says. ‘What it shows is the very sad moment the straw broke the camel’s back.’
That, though, is not how the AA saw it. Dismissing Mr Mackenzie for gross misconduct, the firm would later describe the incident as an ‘unprovoked, sustained and violent’ attack on another executive.
The AA’s new chief executive, Simon Breakwell, praised his board for acting swiftly and ‘honourably’ in sacking his predecessor.
Despite the move wiping £200 million off the company’s value, the AA sent a clear message that there was no excuse for such behaviour.
The matter, however, is far from over. This month, Mr Mackenzie filed a claim in the High Court alleging wrongful dismissal and accusing the AA of having little regard for his well-being. He alleges the incident was not properly investigated and claims the AA ‘dismissed and belittled’ the state of his mental health in a bid to justify his dismissal.
He is suing for damages of up to £220 million — the potential value of the 33million incentive shares he held but forfeited after being classed a ‘bad leaver’.
The AA has asked him to pay back £1.2 million in past bonuses, reportedly over an alleged separate altercation with a member of the public, which his lawyers dispute.
In a medical report, which forms part of the High Court claim, a clinical psychologist who examined Mr Mackenzie four days after the altercation said he had been suffering months of ‘raised anxiety, sleep disturbance, concentration loss, forgetfulness, increased emotionality and reduced self-regulation with irritability and outbursts of anger’.
It continued: ‘These symptoms could be the consequence of a progressive neurological illness or a toxic combination of extremely high stress levels including feeling completely undermined by his executive colleagues and taking on unreasonable levels of responsibility.
‘Bob needs to be treated by the company as if he has had a heart attack and be signed off work for approximately six months.’
Speaking today, Mr Mackenzie insists his High Court claim is not about money, but justice and the restoration of his good name.
He also wants to highlight the issue of executive burn-out. ‘Before all this, I had no concept of mental illness or what severe stress could do. I’d always been so tough and resilient, but with the benefit of hindsight, I can see now that I was
like a time bomb waiting to go off.
‘If it hadn’t been that, it would probably have been a heart attack or stroke, because the pressure of being chairman and running the day-to-day business had become relentless.
‘My wife kept saying to me: “When are you going to retire? You didn’t sign up for this.” I was too proud to let go of the reins. I felt such a duty to shareholders, I ignored all the warning signs which had started a year or 18 months before the incident.
‘The stress affected me so badly, at times I feared I was developing dementia. Despite all my hard work and loyalty to the AA and its shareholders, sometimes I felt unloved and unsupported.’
He can now see how unwell he was, recalling bursting into tears when he and Jane arrived late to host a corporate event at the Wimbledon tennis tournament a year before his meltdown. He obsessed over the letting go of a senior colleague and couldn’t stop thinking about the suicide of his mother, aged 48, when he was 22 — a traumatic event he’d ‘parked’ to one side for years.
Never a heavy drinker, he started using alcohol more to help cope with the pressures of work and help him sleep. Prescribed diazepam for back pain, he took three tablets that fateful day because he was worried about ‘losing my temper’.
Mr Mackenzie bitterly regrets what happened, but claims to be the victim of a ‘boardroom coup’ by rivals who saw an opportunity to oust him when he was unwell — without any compensation or recognition for his achievements.
Among other things, he reportedly tried to block a deal — since dropped — to sell off the AA’s insurance arm, a deal he felt would have been good for executives who held incentive shares, but less so for shareholders in the long term. He is also said to have blocked a private equity buy-out. There were, he says, clashes.
Before the hotel incident, Mr Mackenzie had been upset about a presentation to the board at Pennyhill Park about such a sale.
Asked to attend an ‘off the record’ meeting by senior colleagues following the altercation, he apologised and explained he’d felt severely stressed. Alarmed by his own behaviour, he said he’d absent himself from work to consult the company doctor.
By the time he’d been referred to a psychologist, however, the seriousness of the situation was becoming apparent.
‘I think the AA was paranoid about the CCTV footage getting out onto social media and damaging the company’s reputation,’ he says. Before being admitted as a psychiatric in-patient at a private clinic five days after the hotel brawl, Mr Mackenzie says he received a compromise agreement from the AA.
‘Peter read it out to me, but he may as well have been reading the football results. The only option I understood was “Do nothing”,’ he says. ‘Lawyers refused to let me sign because of my state of mind.’
He says he was left with the feeling the company doubted his illness was genuine.
Peter adds: ‘Dad was so unwell he was shaking, I had to sleep next to him because I was so worried he was suicidal. It’s very distressing to think anyone could consider his illness as a hoax.’
Peter says his father would have been happy to submit to a second independent medical report, but this was not requested.
Since his legal fightback, Mr Mackenzie further claims he has become the victim of a ‘vindictive’ campaign. He points out that the AA asked him to return bonuses, claiming he should have informed them about another altercation which led to him breaking his leg and ankle two years ago.
Mr Mackenzie says he suffered the injury while defending his wife when they were allegedly assaulted after returning to their London flat from a dinner party by a woman, who later claimed their driver had run over her foot.
He told the board only that he’d slipped, which he says was ‘the truth’. His leg became trapped between the car and kerb in the fracas. Police were called, he says, and no further action taken.
Mr Mackenzie says he has already spent ‘hundreds of thousands of pounds’ in legal fees when he could go and enjoy retirement, with properties in London, Warwickshire and Norfolk.
But he says: ‘This is about righting a wrong. What I did fills me with shame, but these were the actions of an unwell man who needed help, understanding and support.’
An AA spokesman said: ‘Mr Mackenzie was dismissed for gross misconduct having launched an unprovoked, sustained and violent attack on a colleague.
‘The first time Mr Mackenzie raised any concerns about his mental health was after having been informed by the AA that his position was untenable.
‘The AA is astonished that Mr Mackenzie continues to pursue this claim and we will contest it vigorously.’
‘What I did fills me with shame but I was unwell’