Former chairman of Channel 4 is a serious workaholic, but insists his passions should not be viewed merely as potential profit centres
It hard to know what makes Luke Johnson tick. He is one of Britain's cheerleaders for entrepreneurial capitalism, writing a national newspaper column that regularly decries the stultifying effect of red tape on small businesses.
Filthy lucre is certainly a motivator for a man who describes himself as an unrepentant capitalist. "It [capitalism] is not a dirty, grubby pastime, as some would have us believe," he says.
His own ventures have yielded him a fortune estimated at £120m, much accumulated after owning and selling UK restaurant brands such as PizzaExpress, Strada and Belgo, as well as higher-end London eateries such as Le Caprice and The Ivy. We meet at his office in a mews off Warren Street in the West End of London, our liaison prompted by a campaign to plug Australian winemaker Penfolds via a series of Johnson speeches about vintage wine.
Without doubt, he is a serious workaholic: a senior partner of private equity firm Risk Capital, which has stakes in nearly a dozen companies; a part-time writer; chairman of the Royal Society of Arts; a director of art publisher, Phaidon Press. He was chairman of Channel 4 for six years until 2010 and recently became involved with former ITV executive Paul Jackson in a bid for a new national television channel.
Johnson likes being busy – in fact, it seems he would be lost if he wasn't. "I'm not one for taking holidays, the idea of lying on the beach is anathema," he says. "I refer to myself as a 'projector', a 17th-century term for a man involved in many different businesses. I suppose I take the view that the greatest enemy is boredom and idleness, and you have to risk failure to enjoy success." Restaurants, food and the media are his passions, and should not be viewed – he insists – merely as potential profit centres.
Disasters
Johnson's fascination for the media should come as no surprise. His father is Paul Johnson, now 82, the historian and former Daily Mail columnist, who caused a stir 30 years ago when he ditched socialism to espouse the ideas of Margaret Thatcher and the new conservatism.
Says Johnson: "I think all of us have a propensity to be drawn to certain businesses and clearly the media industry falls into that category for me."
He takes his journalism seriously, often hunched over the laptop at weekends, bashing out his column. And he likes nothing more than to be congratulated for his outpourings by his editors.
Not that the media industry is an easy a place to make a profit: "In the old days, if you had a great newspaper franchise or a broadcasting licence, you could enjoy high returns, high margins, very high cash flows ... but the era of easy money is over ... unless you run Google." Johnson once described Google as "monstrous" and " profoundly unethical" for its tax payments and effect on the creative industries.
Not all his ventures have been successful. He acquired Borders in Britain for £10m in 2007, but sold for it for "a significant loss" two years later. During the dotcom era, there were a couple of disasters, while he lost £200,000 investing in Sunday Business before the paper was taken over by the Barclay brothers.
Johnson was born in Slough in 1962 and went to Langley Grammar School before attending Magdalen College, Oxford where he studied medicine. He was briefly an assistant for Jonathan Aitken, who was later convicted of perjury after a failed libel suit against the Guardian. A brief stint as a City media analyst was followed by his first major foray into the world of business when he teamed up with his old friend and fellow Oxford graduate Hugh Osmond. They bought into a quoted shell company and launched a reverse takeover of PizzaExpress, valuing the chain at little more than £20m. They sold out in 1999 when the company was worth close to £700m.
Today he runs the East fashion chain, family restaurant chain Giraffe and Patisserie Valerie. He loves the restaurant business as much as media: "It's great fun to be in a sector where your customers are having some of the most enjoyable moments of their lives."
He is wary of the future, saying that if there is an economic recovery, it's a weak one, at best. He is behind the government's efforts to slash public spending, but is no friend of the banks, which he blames for reckless and irresponsible lending.
Prudent
"Banks who retain staff through a heads I win, tails you lose remuneration policy ... that's just wrong. Bankers will always seek to award themselves by taking on too much risk," he says.
"It was better when you had private partnerships. When I first started in stockbroking in the 1980s, the City was full of partnerships, so ultimately the individuals concerned could lose everything, so they didn't bet the bank, they were more prudent. When your home is at stake, it concentrates the mind, you don't tend to take those risks."
Johnson has mellowed over the years, becoming less abrasive and altogether more congenial. Being a family man has helped. He has three children and is married to Lisa, a part-time pharmacist at North Middlesex Hospital. But how does he manage the work/life balance?
"My wife is very understanding, we don't have full-time help, but we have some. At weekends, I take either my eldest son or daughter and say 'right we are going for an adventure'.
"We go for a ride on the tube, but I don't say where we are going, it's like a magical mystery tour. We end up at the zoo or Imperial War Museum. It's very productive being with one at a time, everyone gets a lot more out of it."
What about his children when they grow up? Does he want them to become entrepreneurs? "I think they should do whatever they want. But I hope whatever they do, they will do it with enthusiasm and perhaps, not a little panache."