The fight for a new runway has made me grey!

Says the Gatwick boss, 45, set for a £5m pay day if he wins battle

BEING asked to guess someone’s age is always disconcerting. So when Stewart Wingate, the chief executive of Gatwick, insists I take a stab at how old he is, I decide to err on the flattering side and plump for 48.

In reality, I imagine the genial northeasterner, who has rosy apple-cheeks but a mop of steel grey hair, is several years older, maybe 55.

Oops. He was 45 on Saturday. Clearly, he has been prematurely aged by his tireless championing of his airport in its fight with Heathrow for an extra runway.

Before I start to squirm too visibly, he admits as much. ‘It’s the effect of this battle, it’s taking its toll,’ he laughs.

A decision on which airport will get the extra runway is due within days. But even if it comes out in favour of Heathrow, Wingate won’t give up.

‘There is a strong need for an additional runway at Gatwick. If the Government were to come up with a decision let’s have a runway at both or if they are ambivalent over which airport to choose and want to let the market decide. We would be very happy with that,’ he says.

Beneath the jovial exterior one can detect a very determined man indeed. Wingate is indefatigable in promoting Gatwick, as well he might be, as he stands to make huge personal gains if it succeeds. He earns a relatively modest (by CEO standards) £475,000 salary, with an annual performance bonus of up to the same again.

But he could be in line for a bonus of up to £5m when Gatwick is sold by its private equity and pension fund owners. Getting the go-ahead for an additional runway clearly will boost the airport’s value considerably, so no wonder he’s such a committed salesman.

But does he seriously think Gatwick, situated near Brighton, around 30 miles from central London, is still in with a shout?

After all, a report last year by Sir Howard Davies favoured Heathrow. Only last week researchers found that expansion of the west London airport would not breach air pollution limits, thanks to more environmentally-friendly car engines.

Wingate is scathing about the Davies report, dismissing it as ‘fundamentally flawed’.

HE says: ‘ He has got it wrong when it comes to the potential of Gatwick. His report said we would not achieve 42m passengers until 2030, but this year we will do 43.5m passengers. He is 15 years out on passenger volumes and also wrong on our ability to service long-haul routes.

‘He said we would only achieve 47 long-haul destinations by 2050 but we now already serve 51.’

He also dismisses the air quality report, an independent study led by Cambridge University.

‘The report suggests over the next few years we are going to retire all diesel cars, we are all going to go to electric cars and there is going to be a sea change in how we all behave,’ he says, voice dripping with sarcasm.

Air quality is not the only issue – there is noise pollution too. He even suggests, slightly tongue-in-cheek, that if Gatwick wins, the Queen might have a quieter life. An expanded Heathrow, he says, would mean more flight noise over Windsor. So the Queen would be bothered by the racket?

‘Well, yeah, she probably already is,’ he says. ‘If they build the additional runway, you will have extra flight paths. If you have planes taking off in a westerly direction – which is the prevailing direction that they do take off – then certainly, Windsor, Maidenhead and places like that are right underneath the flight paths.’

The Royals would not be alone. If Heathrow is expanded, he claims, then by 2040 around 800,000 people will be acutely affected by noise. By comparison, the area around Gatwick is ‘quite sparsely populated’ – and there are no royal residences nearby.

Gatwick is now owned by Global Infrastructure Partners, a private equity fund with a 42pc stake. The rest is held by long-term investors such as ADIA, the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, and pension funds including Calpers, which holds the retirement nest-eggs of Californian public servants.

‘Collectively they manage over $1trillion of investments worldwide,’ he says.

‘There is plenty of firepower for a project like this. The first phase is £3bn and our investor group has said to the Government it will put in equity of £1.5bn. We will raise the other £1.5bn through the debt markets, we don’t want a penny of public money.’ Business, he says, has been booming since the Brexit referendum, with no sign that worried Brits were opting for summer staycations.

‘The first thing that happened after the vote was that we had a shareholder meeting where our traffic was going up so fast that we increased our capital by a further £200m. We had anticipated investing £1bn and at the meeting immediately after the referendum we upped that to £1.2bn.’

Wingate, who seems physically unable to let pass any opportunity to plug his message, cannot resist adding: ‘And of course, Brexit is an even bigger argument for getting on and building more airport capacity because we need to communicate to the world that we are open for business.’

In contrast with the Eton and Oxbridge brigade who have colonised most chief executive jobs, he is a comprehensive school lad made good from Bishop Auckland in County Durham, who married Diane, his boyhood sweetheart.

He left school at 16 and embarked on a six-year apprenticeship with drill-maker Black & Decker, which sponsored him through university.

He is touchingly keen to point out he got a first in electronic and electrical engineering from Northumbria University and a distinction in his MBA at Newcastle University.

After working his way up, he was sent to set up a manufacturing plant in the city of Usti Nad Labem in the Czech Republic – one of the facilities that replaced the factory in Spennymoor, County Durham, where he had begun his working life. He also did a two-year spell as boss of Budapest airport, but says he doesn’t speak any foreign languages ‘apart from Geordie’.

He took on his current job in 2009 when Gatwick was spun out of the old British Airports Authority.

Why, though, if his Gatwick gospel is so compelling, does the Government seem to have remained so set on Heathrow?

‘There is a Treasury orthodoxy that says the answer is Heathrow. Gatwick has never had the opportunity to make its case before because it used to be owned by Heathrow. Now we are competing and vying with them. No one can accuse us of not vying.’

No indeed: no one would dare.