Sir John Guinness
‘Archetypal mandarin’ who was rated highly by Mrs Thatcher and managed energy privatisation
SIR JOHN GUINNESS, who has died aged 84, was a scion of the brewing and banking family, but followed his own path as a civil servant and government adviser. As deputy secretary (1983-91), then permanent secretary (1991-92), at the Department of Energy, Guinness was responsible for the privatisation of the gas and the electricity industries. After the Department was abolished in 1992, he stuck with the state sector and opted to move to the chairmanship of British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), the most controversial of the nuclear companies.
Guinness could seem an unlikely figure to head an enterprise that built one of the country’s most ambitious, and controversial, engineering projects at Sellafield (his predecessor, Sir Christopher Harding, had been a career industrialist). Yet as an energy expert he had impeccable credentials, having been involved in nuclear energy policy since working on secondment to the Central Policy Review Staff, Edward Heath’s Cabinet Office “think-tank” in the 1970s.
Moreover as a key adviser on electricity, gas and oil privatisation, and through family connections (his older brother, Sir Howard Guinness, was a senior banker at SG Warburg), he was also well-known in the City.
Guinness was a firm believer in nuclear technology and tended to be dismissive of scare stories. He was happy to eat mussels from the waters off Sellafield, he maintained, and observed that “The radiation per annum from Sellafield is the same a passenger receives during a return flight to Tenerife.”
During his eight years as chairman, he guided BNFL through the renegotiation of contracts with Scottish Nuclear and Nuclear Electric, and the merger of BNFL with Magnox Electric. It was also under his chairmanship that the go-ahead was given in 1993 by the Environment Secretary John Gummer for the opening of the controversial £2.8 billion thermal oxide reprocessing plant (Thorp) at Sellafield in the face of fierce opposition from environmentalists.
The plant had originally been commissioned in 1978, though it was not completed until 1991. When it opened in 1994, Guinness described it as epitomising “all that [the Prime Minister] Mr Major is talking about in the re-industrialisation of Britain”, and forecast that it would earn £1.8 billion for BNFL in its first decade of operation.
But, as it turned out Thorp was plagued with design and operating problems and ran at only around half capacity most of the time. Its original target was to produce 7,000 tonnes of new fuel per decade, but by 2003 it had only produced 3,400 tonnes, generating a cumulative loss of £1 billion. Guinness retired from the chairmanship in 1999 and Thorp eventually closed in 2018.
John Ralph Sidney Guinness was born on December 23 1935, the second of two sons of Captain Edward Guinness, a partner in the family bank of Guinness Mahon, and his first wife Martha Letiere, née Sheldon.
Educated at Rugby and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Guinness seemed destined for the family bank after National Service in the RAF where he learned Russian, and began his career with the money brokers Union Discount.
Deciding the City was not for him, however, in 1961 he joined the Overseas Development Institute, which led to a job the following year at the Foreign Office aid desk.
Over the next 18 years he worked in the FCO itself as well as with the UK mission to the UN, the UN secretariat, and as first secretary (Economic) at the British High Commission in Ottawa.
He was also twice seconded to the Central Policy Review Staff, from 1972 to ‘75 under Lord Rothschild, then from 1977 to ‘79 under Sir Kenneth Berrill.
It was Lord Rothschild who, a few days after his arrival, told him that one of his first tasks was to find out “how one buys a nuclear reactor … take your time but let me know by eight tomorrow morning”. Other tasks with Rothschild included the rescue of Burmah Oil in 1974, a move that saved the financial system from meltdown.
After his two stints in the think-tank, Guinness decided that his interests lay with the Home Civil Service and, thanks to the nuclear connection, he ended up in the Department of Energy. But, characteristically for the Civil Service, he started out in the coal division before moving to oil and gas, then returning to the electricity supply industry.
His involvement in privatisation started with Wytch Farm, the onshore Dorset oilfield, and carried through Enterprise Oil, the electricity generators, distributors and British Gas.
Margaret Thatcher was said to rate him highly, enjoying his directness, but others were reported to find him difficult to get on with. “He has a mind like a chess-player”, an unnamed chief executive of an electricity company was quoted as saying. “He is completely unreadable.” Colleagues noted that he was flattered to be described as “the archetypal mandarin”.
Outside the energy sector, Guinness, who listed his interests in Who’s Who as “iconography”, had an enduring interest in art and architecture. He had a deep knowledge of portraiture and was a member of the National Portrait Development Committee.
He also served, variously, as a member of the East Anglia Regional Committee of the National Trust, as a governor of Compton Verney and a trustee of the Royal Collection Trust and the National Maritime Museum.
From 1995 to 2003 he chaired the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, and in 2005 was chairman of the Expert Panel of the Heritage Lottery Fund. From 2006 to 2013 he chaired the Expert Panel of the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
He was appointed CB in 1985, and knighted in 1999.
In 1967 he married Valerie North, of the North family of Rougham Hall, Norfolk. From 1997 until her death in 2014 they lived at East Barsham Manor, near Fakenham, a Grade I tour de force of Tudor brickwork built between 1520 and 1530.
He is survived by a son and daughter. Another son predeceased him.
Sir John Guinness, born December 23 1935, died July 27 2020