Paul Sykes

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Shuttup and Lissen!

Some other Yorkshire gobby types

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Yorkshire has a fine tradition of people who refuse to keep their opinions to themselves. Our two Prime Ministers, Herbert Asquith and Harold Wilson were not backward in coming forward. Selby born King of England, Henry I built great cathedrals in Westminster, Durham, Norwich and Peterborough and still found time to row with the Pope. And our most effective loudmouth, social reformer William Wilberforce, spoke out for fifty years against the injustice of slavery and changed opinion across the globe. Explorer James Cook endeavoured around the world in the name of science, thus proving that a loud Yorkshire accent can carry you a very long way.

But even these great men would have had a hard time in conversation with our sporting voices. With Brian Clough, Geoffrey Boycott, Fred Trueman, Kevin Keegan, and Prince Naseem Hamed they would not have gotten in a word edgeways.

With a pen we can tackle anyone. WH Auden, JB Priestley, Ted Hughes, Alan Bennett, Maureen Lipman and even Barbara Taylor Bradford can't half write a bit. And its nice to know that on stage and screen the likes of Charles Laughton, James Mason, Dame Judi Dench and Brian Glover could string together a noisy word or two. But we don't really need a stage to make our voices heard. Michael Parkinson, Roy Castle, Jimmy Saville, Frankie Howerd and Monty Python's Michael Palin prove this. Elsewhere you can bet that Marco Pierre White runs a noisy kitchen on the quiet.

And as for our singers, well lets hear it for Lesley Garrett, Dame Janet Baker and, oh go on then, Jane "The Cruise" McDonald and Scarey Spice Mel G. Not a shrinking violet amongst 'em.

And there's the small matter of John Prescott, Willie Hague, David Blunkett and the formidable Betty Boothroyd. "Order! Order!"

More rattle than a can of mabs. Makes you proud, it does.

Northerner_______________________

Sykes Almighty!

From breaking buses to breaking monetary union Paul Sykes has the loudest voice in the crowd

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In a recent league table of the most powerful figures on the Yorkshire scene Paul Sykes was second only to Deputy PM John Prescott. William Hague, leader of the Conservative Party, came a very distant third. He has become the epitome of the angry man who has looked at the political scene and has decided that he has to put his tuppen'orth in. At great volume. Words like forthright, candid and outspoken are a bit too fancy for a man who seems to delight in speaking his piece. Dour, blunt and bluff, in the Yorkshire tradition, on the subject of Europe and the pound he can bore for England. He certainly knows some clog iron...

Sykes personal history is astounding. Son of a miner, dragged up in a south Yorkshire council estate and leaving school unqualified, his first proper job was grafting as a tyre fitter. In a blink of an eye he was breaking up buses and selling the in'erds to Hong Kong and making serious brass in the process. "Selling junk fer t' junks" people said as they passed the yard. By the nineteen seventies he was one of the richest young men in the country. Twenty years on, after moving into property, he was at it again. Along the banks of Sheffields river Don, surrounded by the ghosts of broken old steel mills, he built a glittering new retail centre called Meadowhall. Turning rusting metal into pure gold.

Now Paul Sykes is up with the big lads, organising major business conferences with the likes of Mike Firth, chair of the Yorkshire Food Group, and rubbing shoulders with such heavyweights as Northern Foods Lord Haskins and Asdas Alan Leighton. A short but typically profitable period running his Internet company - Planet Online - later and he's richer than ever and looking for new challenges. Recently he had a crack at running for parliament, standing as Conservative candidate for Barnsley Central. Trying to overturn a 20,000 majority in his home town in yet another long-odds venture.

But what is putting him on the national stage is his attitude to European monetary union. At odds with former Tory Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, and now with former Conservative Party colleagues including William Hague, he's finally decided to do things his own way. As the chairman of James Goldsmith's Democracy Movement he's now, whether he likes it or not, one of the country's leading political mavericks. It's a role he seems to relish. He's got an opinion - that the single currency is an immediate threat to this country's national democracy and must be stopped - and in true Yorkshire style he's not going to shut up and go away.

Like his political antithesis, Arthur Scargill, Paul Sykes has an abrasive manner that winds up friends and enemies alike. His attitude is that of a cornered man who simply cannot keep quiet in the face of what he sees as imminent national disaster. If this means getting peoples' backs up with a bit of plain speaking so be it. Maybe one day Yorkshire will provide a political voice that is gentle, persuasive, warm and winning. But Paul Sykes is forged from hard-tempered steel and hard-nosed business acumen. And he's a Yorkshireman. And you know what Yorkshiremen are like...

Roy Stone__________