Big shot of the week

KEITH HELLAWELL, 75 CHAIRMAN, SPORTS DIRECT

As A policeman, Keith Hellawell revelled in his tough guy image. Tall, broad shouldered with a gimlet- eyed gaze, his soup- strainer moustache bristled with pent-up aggression.

Just ten minutes in a harshly lit room and you suspect he could have frightened a confession out of Mother Teresa.

His reputation as an enforcer inside the boardroom is far less secure. As chairman of sports Direct, the troubled retail chain whose questionable corporate governance and gamey employment practices have been the subject of a parliamentary enquiry, some suspect him of being little more than Mike Ashley’s appointed stooge.

This week he narrowly held on to his post for another year after shareholders voted 53pc in his favour at the AGM. But then Hellawell is nothing if not a survivor.

His post-war upbringing in the West Yorkshire town of Holmfirth, genteel setting of Last Of The summer Wine, sounds so harrowing it makes Angela’s Ashes seem like The sound Of Music.

His

2002 autobiography, The Outsider, describes a sadistic aunt who made him walk to school in the snow barefoot and tied him up when he had chicken pox to prevent him scratching his spots.

While he never knew his father, his mother was a louche-sounding figure who sang in local clubs and shackled him to a table leg when she went out dancing. Home was a council tenement where he was sexually assaulted by a neighbour. Having left school at 15 without any qualifications, young Keith found work down the pit.

Those five years toiling amid the suffocating dust were traumatic. Often he would be dispatched to hunt for colleagues’ severed limbs and sometimes, in the event of a roof fall, retrieve mangled bodies.

He looks back fondly at that time, though, as it was when he first encountered his wife of 57 years, Brenda, whom he met after chasing away a would-be attacker. He claims he fell in love with her on the spot and proposed on her 17th birthday.

Hellawell had always wanted to be a copper. After marrying, he joined West Yorkshire Police on the second attempt, becoming Britain’s youngest sergeant aged 23 and progressed through the ranks to assistant chief constable in 1983.

He earned a reputation as a bruiser, shutting police station bars and clearing out senior officers to make way for more recruits on the beat, and he advocated capital punishment.

When Hellawell was made chief constable in 1993, he would arrive at the station each morning in a black Porsche and wearing a black leather jacket. Cheeky bobbies nicknamed him Knight Rider. He came to prominence in 1998 when he was appointed Tony Blair’s £103,000-a-year ‘drugs czar’.

LiKe

most of New Labour’s headline-grabbing initiatives, the puffed-up role amounted largely to window dressing. Hellawell resigned after four years when the Government downgraded cannabis to a class C drug.

so what qualifies Hellawell to run a sprawling retail empire which until last year was still trading inside the FTse 100? Not a great deal, truth be told. He’s previously held a clutch of business roles, including at energy firm Dalkia, chemical business sterience and pharmaceutical outfit Goldshield.

But a disastrous appearance at a Commons select committee two years ago, in which he was frequently unable to answer questions, laid bare his lack of experience on the executive circuit. ‘i didn’t realise i was on trial,’ he moaned at one point. But the main charge against him is that he provides a woefully insufficient counterweight to Ashley’s boorishness.

in the past 18 months, the company has reported a 60pc dive in profits, while revelations of its dire working practices have made its warehouse a cause celebre.

Just what does he have to do to get removed? To be fair, judging by his increasingly weary media appearances, you get the impression no one is less happy to still be in the role than Hellawell.

Perhaps next year sports Direct shareholders will be good enough to put him out of his misery.