'Businessman as popular hero' Sir Tom Farmer

SIR Tom Farmer once said that he wanted his epitaph to say: "He fitted more tyres than anyone else." Unfortunately that modest aspiration may now be beyond him. When it eventually comes to be inscribed, the wording is just as likely to say: "He helped change the face of UK government."

An exaggeration? We don't know yet. But it was Farmer's decision, as arguably the best known businessman in Scotland, to donate 100,000 to "level the playing field" between the SNP and Labour that launched the war-of-the-business-backers that was to dominate the May election. His backing, and the other endorsements it precipitated, may well have helped give the nationalists their winning edge.

Although Sir George Mathewson's later intervention was more explicitly pro-SNP, Farmer, as first mover, and as a known political non-combatant (although the record shows a past admiration for Margaret Thatcher) transformed the entire climate of business assumptions about nationalist rule.

"I had to think long and hard about the pros and cons of intervening, but I'm glad I did," Farmer said later. "I knew that I had to publicly back the need for a change. Now we have a very interesting situation where the parties are almost forced to work together for the good of the country."

It is appropriate that it will be Farmer who is remembered as the new Scottish government's first big business catch. His career is built on forcing fundamental change as much as it is about his talent for hard grind.

You may still be wondering why a "non-nationalist" (who eccentrically claims that independence was a "red herring" in the SNP's campaign), should volunteer for a Pearl Harbor strike on Scottish Labour's rusting battle fleet.

He certainly did not need the publicity, and his day-to-day activities, as property magnate, co-owner of the growing semi-charitable Kwik-Fit successor "Tyres'n'Wheels@Farmer" and chairman of the Duke of Edinburgh Award and the Vatican's arts and treasures committee, among a plethora of charitable and philanthropical activities that have seen him knighted twice - by the Queen and the Pope.

He is a non-exec director of MyTravel Group, trustee of the Clerk Maxwell Cancer Research Fund, honorary president of Young Enterprise Scotland, trustee of Scottish Business Achievement Award Trust, honorary president of the Entrepreneurial Exchange, deputy lieutenant of the City of Edinburgh, and founder chancellor of Queen Margaret University.

He sold Kwik-Fit for 1 billion to Ford in 1999, personally pocketing 78m. Tyres'n'wheels is a comparatively modest affair with 14 sites in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Although Farmer hopes it will expand to about 50 sites, its chief purpose - in tune with his long-term commitment to encouraging start-ups - is to "help lads who want to set up in business". About 25 per cent of its profits go to local charities.

Farmer also has 50 per cent equity in several property companies, including Duddingston House Properties and Morston Assets, which last month completed a series of deals in England for 400m.

In a land where the prophet is nearly always without honour, Farmer, 66, was Scottish business's first popular superstar - another contender for the top line of that epitaph.

"Unless you go abroad like Andrew Carnegie, traditionally nobody is ever going to congratulate you for making lots of money in Scotland," says one Edinburgh businessman who has followed Farmer's career.

"Tom changed all that. It was not just that he made being a Scottish tycoon acceptable, he was the first businessman-as-a-popular hero, paving the way for the likes of Tom Hunter, Jim McColl or Duncan Bannatyne."

"He did it by being an ordinary guy, born in a two-roomed tenement flat in Leith and all that, plus having a pretty shrewd idea of how to tug on the old heartstrings."

Bannatyne, the health-club king now best known as Mr hard-to-impress on the TV programme Dragons' Den, loses his air of exasperated contempt when Farmer is in question.

"I've worked with Tom in charities in Scotland and on an aid trip to Malawi. In both cases the word that springs to mind is approachable. He was going into these tiny villages in the middle of the African bush and chatting to people as if he was walking down a street at home."

Another reason for Farmer's belief that the SNP was the most likely engine of change can be found in the communitarian instincts that have been a theme of Farmer's activities for decades. As he puts it: "I feel very strongly that we live in an environment where people who could and should have an influence won't stick their head above the parapet. I feel that there is a lot of brainpower and vision and ability that has to be tapped."

He is explicit in his admiration for the SNP's "clear thinking" economic team of John Swinney and Jim Mather and - most importantly - he takes Alex Salmond's rhetoric about inviting all the talents to solve Scotland's problems at face value.

Certainly his sense of those problems, stemming from his charity work, is acute. "Passionate" is too degraded a term to describe Farmer's sense of the waste of potential in contemporary Scotland.

The best brains in the country, he says, have to be applied to addressing the scandalous divergence in life expectancy in the prosperous and poor areas of Scotland, in the 20 per cent of the population he believes are not getting their fair share. "It's not right" is his constantly repeated phrase.

Should we expect to see Farmer in a key entrepreneurship-promoting role in an SNP council of wise men? Farmer modestly asserts that God gave him common sense and energy but not intellect, and is coy about his place within Salmond's big tent, insisting that others are more qualified than he.

Nor does he have a lot of time on his hands. Any notion that he is twiddling his thumbs in semi-retirement is dispelled by the bare fact that his estimated personal fortune grew from 122m to 130m over the past year, making him the 532nd richest man in the UK, and the 32nd richest in Scotland.

His work ethic is legendary, and the worst that is ever said of him is that he expects the same commitment from others.

"As anyone who has seen his performances will tell you, Tom is a great motivator," says the economist Professor Sir Donald Mackay. "I never thought of him as a political animal, but as a business thinker of enormous clarity of thought, focus, determination, drive and good humour."

Having crucially won Farmer's endorsement before the election, Scotland's new leaders will be hoping there are further ways he can help inject all of those much needed qualities into Scotland plc.