“The whole thing makes me very, very, very, uncomfortable for my children, my grandchildren. I do find it unbelievable,” he confesses. “When I think about my father-in-law, he grew up in the East End, they were all members of the Labour Party. Now it’s a disaster and Corbyn bears a lot of responsibility for it.”
Levene is in reflective mood when I interview him in his elegant offices at the insurance underwriters Starr right across the road from the eclectic Richard Rogers designed Lloyd’s of London building where he was chairman for eight years. For many years Levene’s children have been nagging him to record his life story and he has now done so in his memoir Send for Levene. Among his discoveries was that his paternal family had established themselves in Britain by the early 19th Century. They were poor and working class, one a master butcher, lived on Middlesex Street in the City of London in the ward of Portsoken. Coincidentally that was the ward he chose when he became an Alderman of the City, later its Lord Mayor, and now forms part of his title as a peer.
His other discovery is that his great grant-parents were so down on their luck that his grandfather ended up in the Norwood Jewish orphanage from where he was sent to train as a watchmaker. He eventually had a shop in Fulham Road.
Peter Levene had a relatively comfortable upbringing in Willesden. His mother’s family came from Russia and spoke mainly Yiddish. Born during the blitz, Levene was barmitzvah locally and proudly tells me he learned to lein the whole sedra of Vayigash. His first job was working for a Jewish Scotsman who had a business buying selling war surplus on Tottenham Court Road.
His boss Benny Linden was a “brilliant man but totally screwed up and had a persecution mania. He thought everyone who was working for him was trying to cheat him.” Levene developed a mail order catalogue of defence equipment for foreign buyers.
The breakthrough for Levene came when United Scientific became a publicly quoted company. Levene became the boss of the quoted firm. He made precision periscopes for weapons, travelling the world to sell goods and eventually started a factory in Singapore after some help from an Israeli intermediary. His crowning glory was buying British Leyland’s tank division Alvis in “the biggest deal I ever did at £27m.”
The transformation of United Scientific was noticed in Whitehall and in 1984 Michael Heseltine persuaded him to join the Ministry of Defence as personal adviser. He later became procurement czar.
United Scientific had moved from being a company employing just 20 people to a defence supplier employing 5,000 on three continents with turnover of £130m and a future order book of £140m. But “I was getting bored.”
Soon Levene was moving in the highest circles of Whitehall and the government. “If Thatcher said, ‘Do something’, that’s the way you had to go. If you said, ‘No’, you were dead…She was right 90 percent of the time,” he recalls. “But as time moved on, she lost the plot. She became more and more dictatorial and became right less and less.”
He says John Major was greatly underrated. “His ability to run a meeting of a dozen people was amazing and he was always well prepared.” His weakness was that he was “very poor in front of the television cameras.”
Under Major, Levene came up with the idea that instead of government doing everything itself it could do things better and more cheaply by outsourcing work to the private sector. This personal initiative effectively led to the birth of two of the biggest outsourcing firms, Serco and Capita (both of which have suffered in recent times).
When the Tories left office in 1997 Levene quickly followed. There was a brief moment when it looked as if he might become the successor to the great Arnold Weinstock at GEC. Then Lord Prior, the former Cabinet minister, thenchairman of GEC, turned up at Levene’s office and said no.
“It was very, very strange. I had known Arnold for years. When I first started at the Ministry of Defence we fought like cat and dog. Then he realised the game had changed. And we got on very well. But I was very annoyed.”
Levene is still puzzled. “I don’t know if Prior was antisemitic, which is quite possible. Or whether a lot of people in business who I had beaten up didn’t like it.”
The third stage of Levene’s life took him into investment banking as deputy chairman of the US investment bank Wasserstein Perella and later Morgan Stanley. While working there he was drafted in by government to do some trouble-shooting at Docklands Light Railway. Before long he was being courted by Paul Reichmann, the strictly Orthodox pioneer of Canary Wharf, to run the company which was on the verge of going bust. Initially, Levene was cautious but then he was asked to come in by the Bank of England and that sealed matters.
His job at Canary Wharf was to turn the thing around. Before long he had persuaded Tesco to open an anchor store there, Barclays followed and the thing took off.
The best was still to come for Levene as Lord Mayor of London where he demanded a Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Abraham Levy. The Bevis Marks choir became a feature at Mansion House dinners. He made an official visit as Mayor to Israel.
The Foreign Office insisted that if he were to visit Israel he would have to go the Palestinian territories too. There he encountered Yassir Arafat. “An annoying toad,” says Levene, before diplomatically adding, “but sort of charming.”
His trip included a visit to Gaza. Returning to Tel Aviv, addressing an audience of 250 Israelis at the Hilton, he asked how many people had been to Gaza just 50 miles away. ‘Nobody,’ was the answer.
Levene, was drafted in as chairman of the American investment bank Bankers Trust’s London operation in 1998.
It was soon to be swallowed by Germany’s Deutsche Bank. At one point Deutsche boss Joe Ackermann wanted to close down the bank’s operation in Israel. Levene advised against. When asked why not, Levene replied: ‘If you don’t understand I don’t think I can explain.’
His next major gig was at Lloyd’s of London, just as it was starting to emerge from the shadow of the crisis of the “names” — the many private investors — who had lost their shirts in the 1980s and 1990s. Levene’s seven year stint began in 2003, soon after the market reported the biggest ever loss of £3.1bn.
In many ways helping to steer Lloyd’s back to health, in a long eight year stint as chairman, was a huge achievement.
Throughout his business, government and City life Levene has never lost touch with his Jewishness. He is member of the Great Portland Street shul but following a back injury he is not a regular: “I don’t walk so much.”
Levene is hugely enthusiastic about Belsize Square Synagogue where his offspring belong. “My wife loves it because the men and women sit together. It’s very nice. They have a choir and play the organ.”
The great Whitehall and City fixer may have stumbled on some diversity lessons for the United Synagogue.
Send for Levene is published by Nine Elm Books
