On Professor Lord Bhattacharyya:

He never ceased to surprise me.

He’d call you for something and you’d walk in, and you could just be walking into a room with him or you could be walking into a room with the Prime Minister.

You never knew what you were going into.

He was a supreme influencer, networker: he knew how to link people up, and he linked them up not for his own good but always for some greater good.

He just had an energy about him – more than anything else, he had this energy to drive things.

He was such a kind, caring person. He would come over as quite brusque and he wasn’t. He really did care about things.

The times I saw him upset were when people he didn’t even know were going to be hurt or affected by something. So, like, when there was going to be mass redundancies somewhere else, he got really upset about that. And he really did care about people.