This is taken from The Observer:

Up close with the Barclays' 'consigliere'

Former BBC business chief Jeff Randall is back in print. And, having paid his editorial dues, he has some scores to settle, writes James Robinson
Sunday January 15, 2006

Where better to interview Jeff Randall than over dinner at a City restaurant called the Don? The wisecracking Telegraph editor-at-large likes a joke, but he can be an intimidating presence as he chomps on his cigars, shrouded in a cloud of smoke. Cross this 'godfather' and you might end up being 'whacked' - just ask David Cameron, who has come in for some scathing criticism in Randall's column recently.

Randall is now a highly paid Daily Telegraph columnist, and part of the gaggle of very experienced newspaper executives recruited to the top of the Barclay brothers' press empire. In 1998, before he joined the BBC, he launched Sunday Business for the twins and has maintained a good relationship with them. When he made it known last summer that he was leaving the BBC, he was 'called by the proprietors'. Does that make him the Barclays' consigliere, dispensing advice on how to run the papers?

'I'm not sure about consigliere. Do they ask for my views from time to time? Yes. I worked for the Barclays and I left the family on very good terms. We were never close, but I used to see Aidan (David's son and Telegraph chairman) twice a year for a gossip. They had a little bit of trouble up in Liverpool, which I helped them with.'

The Barclays' purchase of Littlewoods played badly in the city, particularly after they axed several hundred jobs. 'They cut the payouts to the Moore family's charities of choice and redirected the payments. I did a piece in the Liverpool Post in which I said "they are not slash and burn merchants".' The Barclays subsequently sent a large cheque to the Alder Hey children's hospital.

Randall is also a beneficiary of the brothers' largesse. He is rumoured to have bagged a sizable golden handshake when he left their employ to join the BBC, and Telegraph sources say he's well paid for his twice-weekly columns. But his influence may run wider than that.

He is close to the Telegraph's associate editor and business editor, Will Lewis, who is a candidate for the vacant editor's chair currently being kept warm by editor-in-chief John Bryant. 'Will is very much his own man, but from time to time he asks my opinion.'

A former sports editor and business editor at the Sunday Times, Randall is also on good terms with Rupert Murdoch, brokering a truce between the press baron and former Tory chairman Michael Aschroft a few years ago after Aschroft sued the Times for libel. That cemented Randall's reputation as something of a 'fixer', and a heavyweight who is often tipped for an editor's job himself. 'I'm not interested,' Randall insists. 'I've been there and done that; I've paid my dues. I will never edit anything ever again. Nor will I manage a big pool of staff. I'm interested in being a columnist, a reporter and a broadcaster.'

He defends the Telegraph, which some critics say has lost its way under the Barclays and become obsessed with aping the Daily Mail. 'Does it still feel like the Telegraph? Yes it does. John Bryant has brought a period of calm to the paper. Every time there is change in the press, the press itself reacts like Krakatoa's just gone off. My missus, who reads it every day, wouldn't know if the editor was dead or alive.' He says designers are working to bring consistency to the daily, although similar signs of enthusiasm for the new-look Sunday title are rather more difficult to detect.

He has no formal management responsiblity, but his views carry weight - never more so than when he's opining on the future of the Tory party. He recently described David Cameron, with whom he crossed swords when Cameron was a Carlton Communications chief, as a 'company bag-carrier'.

'He was a PR flunky. There was one occasion when he came far too close to denying something that was true. His idea of talking to the press was a bit like talking to the great unwashed and I resented that, but I don't want to come across as a chippy working-class grammar school boy. I fought the BBC's bias against "toffee-nosed gits".'

Randall became the corporation's first business editor in 2001 at the behest of Greg Dyke, then director-general. 'What broke the camel's back for Greg was that the BBC failed to cover the Vodafone bid for [German company] Mannesmann. It was the world's biggest takeover bid. That caused Greg Dyke and senior news executives to say: "We've got to do something about this. We've got to bring in someone who's not like us. We need an agent of change".'

Many at the BBC eyed him with suspicion, but that was to be expected, he says. 'On the whole, they treated business as if it was a criminal activity. I was there to rattle cages and, if necessary, make myself unpopular to force business up the news agenda. When I started, Greg Dyke warned me, "don't go native; be an agent of change".'

There was little chance of that. He concedes that some critics feared he would be the PR wing of the CBI. 'They didn't distinguish between me being passionate about business and me being an apologist for business,' he says.

Most of the stories he covered were 'negative stories', especially in the early days when there was a wave of corporate scandals in the US and several British companies, including Cable & Wireless, were imploding. 'No one could say I went on there and did a puff job for business.'

He hopes to be remembered for revealing that Roman Abramovich was about to buy Chelsea ('I had researchers Googling Pravda'), but 'my best story' was that Sir Peter Davis was to be ousted as Sainsbury chairman.

After four years in the job, does Randall think the BBC will maintain its business output? 'You'll need to look again in 18 months' time,' he says. Much will depend on the corporation's new business editor, Robert Peston, who has yet to take up the post but has already made several appearances on air. Peston's intellectualising on radio, or in the pages of the Telegraph - where he is associate editor - contrasts starkly with Randall's 'man of the people' patter. 'Talking to 5 million viewers from all sections of society is very different from writing for the business cognoscenti in the Telegraph,' Randall warns.

Peston has also written a book on Gordon Brown and covered politics at the Financial Times. 'Because he knows so much about politics and economics, the challenge will be for him to resist being sucked into that,' says Randall. 'When I arrived I said I stood on the crossroads of commerce and finance; the economics editor [Evan Davies] stood on the crossroads of economics and politics. That's why we didn't fall out. Because I was the first BBC business editor, the corporation accepted that how I did business journalism was the right way. Robert's got to be his own man. He'll need to rip up the Randall blueprint.'

Randall still hosts a weekly radio show on Radio Five Live - which was controller Bob Shennan's idea - and is at pains to point out that he holds the BBC in high regard. Even so, he was always going to clash spectacularly with what he regards as the corporation's liberal-left consensus.

'I never really felt like a BBC person. I was always an outsider looking in. I challenged a lot of values. There are certain issues the BBC regards as basic truths.'

The NHS is one example, he says. 'Most people at the BBC would think it's a good thing for the government to spend more money on the NHS and it goes unchallenged. There's a section of opinion out there who think it's throwing money down the drain.' But surely the BBC's journalists give the government a hard time? 'They attack Labour ministers, but usually for not being sufficiently left-wing.'

Immigration is another bugbear for Randall. 'At the risk of sounding immodest, I think I changed the terms of the debate. Whenever we had an anti-immigration interviewee, it was a Nazi with a tattoo on his face who looked like he'd just bitten the head off a cat. I pointed out that it's the white working class who have to make immigration work. Immigrants don't move to Hampstead, mate.'

BBC bosses offered him a post in Paris as an incentive to stay - 'a lifelong dream'. But his family was lukewarm on the idea and he was happy to move back to print. He will continue working on radio and is considering several offers of TV work, including one to host a business-related quiz show.

Randall may have made the leap from print to broadcasting, but it wasn't an easy transition and he admits he had some terrible days at the office, including a live 'two-way' with Huw Edwards on Marks & Spencer. 'Huw asked: "Jeff, what does it mean for shoppers?" I thought: "Well Huw, I'm crappity smacked if I know." I goldfished.'

After years in print, he had to learn to be succinct on screen. 'Andrew Marr said to me, "You just need two big thoughts". I said, "What's the second one for?" He replied, "In case you forget the first one".' But after four years, the job became less stimulating. 'When I knew I wasn't going to fluff it, the adrenaline rush disappeared.'

Before he left, he was awarded the ultimate accolade of a Rory Bremner impression: 'It was a reasonable impression but he thought I was trying to mask my accent, which was absolutely untrue.'

The 'Essex man' tag will always attach itself to Randall - one industry wag describes him as 'a thinking man's Kelvin MacKenzie'. But there is a steely single-mindedness behind the jokes which is perhaps more Guy Ritchie heavy than Scorsese mafioso. 'I do bear a grudge', he concedes. 'I don't like being lied to and I don't like being treated like an idiot.' Cigar in hand, he runs through the hit-list in his head. 'I haven't settled all the scores yet.'

Life and times

Jeff Randall, 51, studied economics at Nottingham University and lectured briefly before switching to journalism. He worked on trade titles before joining the Sunday Telegraph as a business reporter in 1986. From 1989 to 1995 he was City editor of the Sunday Times, then briefly joined PR firm Financial Dynamics as chairman. He returned to the Sunday Times as assistant editor and sports editor in 1996 and was launch editor of the Barclay brothers' Sunday Business in 1997.

In his own words

On broadcasting 'Long after the scoop is forgotten, people still remember the joke or the clever phrase'

'Newsreaders aren't highly paid trolley-dollies'

On the BBC... 'It was a real challenge not to screw up in front of millions. I loved it'

'On many days I'd be up at 5.20am and I'd still be broadcasting on the 10 'o' Clock News. In the end it starts to wreck your life'

...and its alleged bias 'It's not a conspiracy. It's visceral. They think they are on the middle ground'

On the Telegraph 'Martin [Newland] was already in crisis when I arrived'

On his accent 'They said I had to take elocution lessons. The only thing I did was speak more slowly' He left to become BBC business editor four years later. He resigned last year and is now editor-at-large at the Daily Telegraph. A keen golfer, racing enthusiast and Glasgow Rangers fan he lives in Brentwood, Essex, with his wife, Susan and teenage daughter, Lucy.