Sir Paul Judge
Entrepreneur who founded Cambridge’s business school and was director general of the Tory party
SIR PAUL JUDGE, who has died aged 68, enjoyed a high-flying career in the food industry, served as director general of the Conservative Party organisation from 1992 to 1995 and donated a substantial chunk of his fortune to his alma mater, Cambridge University, to found its business school, now the Cambridge Judge Business School.
Judge’s rise in the business world was meteoric. From Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences, he landed a scholarship to the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating two years later with an MBA. After a summer spent driving from Philadelphia to Mexico and back in a 1967 Mustang, he returned to Britain with a job in Cadbury Schweppes, and by the time he was 28 he had risen to the position of deputy finance director.
After 13 years with the company, including a spell running its Kenya operations, in 1986 he negotiated a £97 million management buy-out – the biggest of its kind in its day – of its food businesses, to form Premier Brands, of which he became managing director and subsequently chairman. In 1986 he was one of the “Top 40 under 40” executives chosen by Business Magazine.
Judge and his fellow directors risked their homes borrowing money to clinch the deal, but the gamble paid off. By 1989, three years after the buy-out, Premier Brands’ annual profits had risen from £6m to £31m. When the business was sold for £310m the same year, Judge’s initial investment of £90,000 had risen in value to £45m.
Judge invested the proceeds in a range of other businesses and established a charitable foundation. He used £8 million to finance the new business school at his old university to improve the calibre of managers in British industry.
“We have always had the attitude of the educated amateur in this country when it comes to management,” he explained in an interview. “Our traditional universities have been disinclined to view it as a profession like law or medicine which needs to be properly taught and needs proper facilities.”
The school, originally called the Judge Institute of Management Studies and situated on the site of the Old Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Trumpington Street, was officially opened by the Queen in 1995, and Judge chaired its advisory board for 12 years. It rose rapidly in the rankings and the Cambridge MBA programme is now ranked among the top in the world by Bloomberg, the Financial Times, Forbes magazine and others.
Judge’s foray into the political arena as unpaid director general of the Conservative Party organisation was less happy. Appointed in 1992 by the then party chairman Norman Fowler, to “provide leadership to our professional staff ”, he was credited with overseeing a turnaround in party finances, reducing its overdraft from £19 million to only £2 million.
But he was said to have made enemies in 1993 when 50 party workers were made redundant as part of a cost-cutting drive. Senior staff complained of being distracted by his lengthy meetings on organisational matters, and there was embarrassment in January 1995 when he lost a libel action against the Guardian over a 1993 article alleging that Conservative Central Office had been guilty of “obstruction” and “old tricks” in failing to respond speedily to accountants’ inquiries about funds donated to the party by the fugitive business tycoon, Asil Nadir.
Judge ended up having to pay both sides’ costs – estimated at £300,000 – and was subsequently reported to have been ousted by a subsequent party chairman, Brian Mawhinney, as “part of an effort to improve the party machine”, although he spent a further year as a ministerial adviser to the Cabinet Office on competitiveness, deregulation, privatisation and IT. In 2009, however, he set up the Jury Team, a political movement aimed at promoting independent candidates in United Kingdom domestic and European elections.
The only child of a schoolmaster, Paul Rupert Judge was born on April 25 1949 and grew up in the Forest Hill area of south London where he made extra pocket money selling programmes at Blackheath rugby club on Saturday afternoons.
From St Dunstan’s College, Catford, he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. He specialised in chemistry and would probably have pursued a career as a research chemist had he not read Anatomy of Britain by Anthony Sampson, which convinced him that “the business area was a good one to be in.”
After selling Premier Brands, Judge served for two years as chairman of Food From Britain, where he was a driving force behind efforts to narrow the food industry trade deficit, before taking the newly created job of director general at Conservative Central Office.
Judge, whose interests included travel, photography and steam railways, maintained a substantial portfolio of business interests, including as a director (and chairman from 2005-13) of Schroder Income Growth Fund. At various times he was also a main board director of the Boddington Group, of Grosvenor Development Capital and the WPP Group. He was a member of the advisory board for Barclays Private Bank and chairman of Teachers TV, a free-to-air television channel.
He served, variously, as chairman of the Royal Society of Arts; president of the Chartered Management Institute; president of the Association of MBAS and chairman of the Marketing Standards Board. He also sat on the board of the Higher Education Funding Council for England.
An Alderman of the City of London, from 2006 to 2007 he chaired the Lord Mayor’s “City of London – City of Learning” project. He was the Aldermanic Sheriff of the City for 2013-14.
Judge was knighted in 1996 for public and political services and in 2013 was appointed a Brother of the Order of St John by the Queen.
His first two marriages, to Jane Urquart and Anne Marie Foff, were dissolved, and in 2002 he married Barbara (née Singer), chairman of the Pension Protection Fund from 2010 to 2016. She survives him with his sons, Christopher and Michael, from his marriage to Anne Marie.
Sir Paul Judge, born April 25 1949, died May 21 2017