(16 Jul 2025, 7:47 pm)S830OFT wrote Well Nigel couldn't possibly be cash-strapped as he regularly asks for spare football tickets on twitter if you check him out! He seems to just be a smithers with the LAs, Politicians & GAG, trying to please them, there's definitely a hierarchy and he isn't top of it.
Can't imagine the red carpet is rolled out on his monthly visits in the North East, although I'm sure word spreads that the Führer has arrived..
Agreed on all points you raise regarding hierarchy. In the grand scheme of things, in a corporate multinational, he himself is no more just a name on a ledger than the worker bees are seemingly made to feel within his subsidiaries. He's just a balance sheet merchant managing the business remotely. He has minions half his age at a local level who take direction and carry out his bidding. There's a reason he's known as 'Nasty Nige'.
His early career is not well documented online; the earliest record I've managed to source has him as Operations Director at Preston Bus from 1993 until 1999, at which point he moved to Warrington Borough Transport. I'd hazard a guess, with a 1964 date of birth, he may have caught the last wind of an NBC management traineeship, but equally, he may have only worked in the bus industry post-privatisation. He'd have been in his adolescent years during the strikes of the 1970s and the Winter of Discontent; perhaps he had some defining experience at a developmental stage whereby he developed an anti-trade unionist position and has increasingly entrenched himself in that throughout his working life.
He might be the only MD overseeing two opcos, but there's literally nothing in the way of any improvement to show for his leadership in the North East, and with the unbelievable amount of agency drivers on the books at Go North West, it doesn't seem to be a roaring success on that front either, especially now they've moved past the honeymoon period of early franchising. He might well have been able to bring about meaningful reform elsewhere at earlier stages in his career, but he's chosen to surround himself with yes men who can't think for themselves and challenge anything, and so he's chosen his own fate.