Lord Stokes, who has died aged 94, had what the Financial Times described as "the toughest job held by any boss in Britain" when, as Sir Donald Stokes, he was given a key role in trying to turn round the British-owned car industry in 1968. The engineer/salesman who symbolised the go-ahead, vibrant, new business elite, had just become chief executive of British Leyland Motor Corporation (BLMC), the flagship company created from Leyland Motors and British Motor Holdings (BMH). Technology minister Tony Benn had tried, in 1966, to persuade the two to come together to save the British Rootes Group from the clutches of the US firm Chrysler, revealing in his diaries that, in October 1967, Stokes and his opposite number Sir George Harriman had been harangued by prime minister Harold Wilson at Chequers. The two industrialists had...
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