Adulatory article on Tim Parker in the Evening Standard in 2013. Funnily enough he doesn’t seem like someone who didn’t have a grip on things.
I don’t love being unpopular, I love to get a job well done and I’m willing to be unpopular,” he says, eyes narrowing. “But actually if you go around and ask people what they feel so many years later, they say we did all the right things and we are doing pretty well.”
After the AA, where he repeated the trick in roadside assistance for his long-time private-equity backer CVC and earned a cool £40 million, Parker was drawn back towards politics. But the idea of being Johnson’s chief executive on a token £1 salary and running Transport for London foundered within a few months when he discovered how many other deputies the mayor retained.
“Had I had the job to do, I could have done a very good job. There is a real need for effective turnaround managers across government and across the public sector but if you really want to manage something, you have got to have the authority and span of control to do it properly.”