Last week at the age of 82 one of the icons of 1980s capitalism, Lord Hanson, died. He became synonymous with the reinvigorated culture of entrepreneurship spawned by the Thatcher and Reagan reforms and put shareholder value back in mainstream culture as the key determinant of business success:

The exploits of corporate raiders did not go down particularly well even in America's capitalist heartland; they appalled many people in a Britain still struggling to get out of its post-war socialist slump. Although knighted by a Labour prime minister, James Hanson was ennobled by an admiring Lady Thatcher, who said that she wanted to run the country like he ran his businesses. By the mid-1980s Lord Hanson was widely viewed as the very essence of the supposedly ruthless capitalism that characterised the decade. After buying Imperial, he was likened to a dealer who bought a load of junk, tarted it up and sold it on as antiques.

When I arrived in London in 1990 to start my career he had reached the nadir of his power with a bold bid for ICI ( which in the end fizzled) and wherever you looked you would see Hanson and his partner Lord White with flashing cuff-links extolling the virtues asset-stripping and creating shareholder value. All of this is now mainstream and textbook stuff, but in the 1980s it was both remarkable and revolutionary.