Fred Astaire moment’s not this unlikely swashbuckler’s only surprise
MIKE Coupe seemed terse on the wireless yesterday morning. Crabby, defensive even, his curiously glottal accent sounded like it had been strained through gravel.
He was clearly feeling a lot more relaxed by the time he went all Fred Astaire in a TV studio later in the day, but a little tension is understandable.
All the more so when you consider that the man currently masterminding an audacious £14.1billion mega merger that would reshape the country’s grocery sector is typically a rather shy character who has never seemed entirely comfortable in the limelight.
When Coupe succeeded Justin King at the Sainsbury’s helm in 2014, analysts described the then commercial director as a safe pair of hands – a polite way of saying don’t expect fireworks.
While King was grocery’s leading man – handsome, fizzy, with a megawatt smile and permatan zooming around in a souped-up Maserati Quattroporte – his replacement looked like your typical beancounter. Tall and sinewy with donnish, tortoise-framed specs, Coupe was an unflashy introvert with a weakness for management jargon. A trifle dull, in other words.
But in the four years since, the 57year-old has stunned everyone with his increasing aptitude for pyrotechnics. If his £1.4billion swoop for Argos in 2016 was a shock, the Asda bid was a marmalade dropper. ‘I have just had to scrape my chin off the floor,’ was one rival retail chief executive’s reaction.
If Coupe’s coup comes off, the deal would vault Sainsbury’s over Tesco, to which it has long played second fiddle.
As group chief executive of the merged companies, there will doubtless also be a substantial boost to Coupe’s £2.3million-a-year remuneration.
Supermarket aisles are in the physics graduate’s blood, and he’s been fortunate to work for some of the sector’s dynamos. At Tesco, he learned at the knee of the firm’s buccaneering chief, Sir Terry Leahy.
At Asda, he was tutored by Archie Norman and Allan Leighton, now the respective chairmen of Marks & Spencer and The Co-op Group.
Raised in West Sussex to a scientist father, Coupe’s first taste of retail came when he took a job in 1982 with a Birmingham-based brassware company called Samuel Heath. He would load up his battered Ford Cortina with samples and tour the North of England flogging his wares while staying in run-down B&Bs. He loved it.
A traineeship at Unilever followed, which saw him posted to a margarine factory in Sussex. But he found working for the sprawling consumer giant monotonous. Coupe lusted for something more entrepreneurial.
He took a job in the marketing department at Tesco, before moving in 1992 to become commercial director at Asda, where Justin King was one of his employees. After that he spent three years at Iceland including an 18 month stint running the company, but when the frozen food supermarket came under new ownership in 2004 he found himself out of a job.
Fortunately King offered him a post as trading director at Sainsbury’s, leaving Coupe now working for his former charge. When King departed, Coupe hesitated about applying for the top job. A dedicated family man, he’s been married to wife Jill for 28 years and has two grown-up daughters. Running a FTSE 100 company would mean increased publicity and at first he wasn’t sure the intrusion was something he wanted.
HOME is an £800,000 terraced house in York, although such are the demands of his role that he spends the week in London and returns North each weekend. As his lean frame suggests, he keeps himself in shape by cycling to work most days.
Coupe’s main passion, as his minor indiscretion yesterday revealed, is music. He makes the pilgrimage to Glastonbury most years, sleeping offsite rather than slumming it in the mud with the hippies. He also plays guitar: at a staff gathering, he once performed a version of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful.
The workers like him. He’s not one for shouting or berating colleagues. Nor is there much of an ego to speak of either. His modest pod in Sainsbury’s open-plan head office in Holborn is far from showy, and is regularly used by other members of staff for meetings.
There was talk last year that Coupe was considering writing an autobiography. For now though, the typewriter will have to be placed to one side.
By far the most interesting chapter in this unlikely swashbuckler’s career is about to unfold.