Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a businessman turned politician, a textbook education, public school,

Cambridge and Harvard Business School, combined with individualistic vision.

He led a dying grocery chain to multi-million

pound profits have made him an object lesson in the successful side of

modern Britain. What he learned on the high street, informality, teamwork and appealing to young people and

women he's now carrying into politics as the Conservative MP for

Tumbridge Wells and a vice president of his party he's determined to see it

modernized and streamlined.

Whenever you go into a new organization, he says, things are usually worse on the inside

than on the outside. He is the now non-executive chairman of

Asda Archie Norman. How dismayed were you then Archie by what you found inside

Torrey Central Office? Was it far worse than you viewed from the outside?

Well, it's not just a question of Central Office, it's a question of the whole Conservative Party.

I think the effect of the catastrophic defeat on May the 1st was to lay bare the fact that our

organization as conservatives has been in decline for some 20 years. It's amazing

that that should have been going on when the Labour Party was streamlining its set up.

Well of course the Conservative Party in a sense has been extremely successful.

We won successive elections extremely handsomely and as a result I suspect the leadership

paid less attention to the grassroots and to the organization than we should have done.

So complacency set in.

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