Rt Hon Lord Sainsbury

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2004

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

This week Sue Lawley's castaway is David Sainsbury, now Lord Sainsbury of Turville.

David Sainsbury who is a grocer and a politician is also one of Britain's richest men and was a multi-millionaire by the time he was in his 20s. However, he says that along with his wealth he has inherited a strong sense of duty. He was the fourth generation of the family to take over the business and became only its sixth chairman in more than 120 years. Although his career at Sainsbury's spanned more than 30 years, he has combined it with following his passion for politics. In the 1980s he bankrolled the Social Democratic Party, and at the time there was talk of him being a future secretary of state for trade in David Owen's cabinet. But, when the SDP imploded in the late 1980s he was disillusioned, and his interest wasn't rekindled until Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party. After the Labour election win in 1997 he was made a lord, and shortly afterwards became a science minister.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Finale of Marriage of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Luxury: Large bath with a constant supply of hot water

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My costway this week is a grosser. It's a description which sounds rather inadequate for someone
0:33.9	who's one of Britain's richest men, a labour peer and a junior minister who was
0:37.8	educated at Eton and Cambridge. He comes from a dynasty of grocer's, a family
0:42.4	that combines commercial acumen with a strong
0:45.2	sense of duty.
0:47.0	He joined the business straight out of university, became its financial director at the age of
0:50.8	33 and eventually succeeded to the top job when his cousin
0:54.4	vacated it. He gave it up to go into government as science minister. He's given
0:59.6	millions of pounds to technical education and mental health research and to the Labour Party.
1:04.3	I think I'm a romantic person he says in the sense that I believe you can change
1:09.7	things. He is David Sainsbury, Lord Sainsbury of Turville. It was a brave move,
1:15.8	David, to go from running one of the biggest companies in the land, Sainsbury's,
1:19.9	to being a junior minister in the sort of cumbersome machinery of government. What made you do it?
1:27.0	Well I think it was actually one of the rather easy decisions of my life because really from my earliest days in business I've been interested in
1:36.5	politics and had a great long-term interest in science so the opportunity to be science minister was one that was, you know, that was a dream come true.
1:46.5	You jumped at it. Yes, that was a very easy decision to make.
1:49.0	But people nevertheless would look at it and think it's a very strange decision. You certainly wouldn't have done it for the money.
1:54.0	I mean, obviously, you don't need the money, but I don't think you'd take any money, do you?
1:57.0	No, I don't have any salary, so I don't think there can be a consideration.
2:01.0	What about the hours?
	...

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