If you don't know who Paul Sykes is, pictured above, here's his BBC profile page.
He built one of the first out of town shopping centres in the UK, Meadowhall; by 1998 his firm Planet Online was the country's largest internet provider, and he is a major political voice in the campaign to prevent the result that many people fear: the UK becoming merely a cog in the giant Europe machine.
Just like Peak resident mountaineer and author Andy Cave, Paul started life as the son of a miner from Barnsley.
Talking of mountaineering, on Saturday March 10th Sir Ranulph Fiennes summitted the North Face of The Eiger, colloquially known as The Eigerwand. Guided by top alpinists Kenton Cool and Ian Parnell, the ascent was sponsored by none other than Paul Sykes, with the aim of raising one and a half million pounds for the Marie Curie Cancer Care charity, which provides high quality nursing, enabling terminally ill people the choice of dying at home, supported by their families.
I think this entire initiative is wonderful; the world's greatest adventurer, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, pitting himself against his fear of heights to summit one of the world's most notorious climbs - the North Face of The Eiger, accompanied by two of the world's leading alpinists, sponsored by one of Yorkshire's most successful and ambitious businessmen and politicians, all to alleviate the suffering of people who know they are going to die.
Yorkshiremen are often parodied for their no-nonsense speaking, and as one who has sampled various flavours of man but finally found bliss with my betrothed, Brian, who is the son of a Yorkshire gas fitter, I have now unequivocally decided that working class Yorkshiremen are like Thornton's chocolates...the very best.
I have just read out the above paragraph to my aforementioned betrothed, Brian. His verdict?
"Sounds a bit like arse-lickin' to me. An' arses are for shitting aht 'av, not lickin'."
Ooooh, I'll leave it in anyway; maybe he won't notice. Anyway, back to my article.
Here is a selection of YouTubes of notable comic portrayals of Yorkshiremen, from Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch to Harry Enfield's genius character George Whitebread, mercilessly taking the piss out of Charlie Higson's pony-tailed advertising executive, here presenting his idea for a bank called "Egg"....several years before the real Egg bank was even dreamed about.
From Ayup! as in, "Ayup! If tha's got summat to say, say it!" - a celebration of Yorkshire folk. And as everyone knows, we've been campaigning for plain speaking since the conquering Romans fucked off back to Italy all those hundreds of years ago.
The following quoted section © Roy Stone from Ayup!
In a recent league table of the most powerful figures on the Yorkshire scene Paul Sykes was second only to Deputy PM John Prescott. William Hague, leader of the Conservative Party, came a very distant third. He has become the epitome of the angry man who has looked at the political scene and has decided that he has to put his tuppen'orth in. At great volume. Words like forthright, candid and outspoken are a bit too fancy for a man who seems to delight in speaking his piece. Dour, blunt and bluff, in the Yorkshire tradition, on the subject of Europe and the pound he can bore for England. He certainly knows some clog iron...
Sykes personal history is astounding. Son of a miner, dragged up in a south Yorkshire council estate and leaving school unqualified, his first proper job was grafting as a tyre fitter. In a blink of an eye he was breaking up buses and selling the in'erds to Hong Kong and making serious brass in the process. "Selling junk fer t' junks" people said as they passed the yard. By the nineteen seventies he was one of the richest young men in the country. Twenty years on, after moving into property, he was at it again. Along the banks of Sheffields river Don, surrounded by the ghosts of broken old steel mills, he built a glittering new retail centre called Meadowhall. Turning rusting metal into pure gold.
Now Paul Sykes is up with the big lads, organising major business conferences with the likes of Mike Firth, chair of the Yorkshire Food Group, and rubbing shoulders with such heavyweights as Northern Foods Lord Haskins and Asdas Alan Leighton. A short but typically profitable period running his Internet company - Planet Online - later and he's richer than ever and looking for new challenges. Recently he had a crack at running for parliament, standing as Conservative candidate for Barnsley Central. Trying to overturn a 20,000 majority in his home town in yet another long-odds venture.
But what is putting him on the national stage is his attitude to European monetary union. At odds with former Tory Chancellor Kenneth Clarke, and now with former Conservative Party colleagues including William Hague, he's finally decided to do things his own way. As the chairman of James Goldsmith's Democracy Movement he's now, whether he likes it or not, one of the country's leading political mavericks. It's a role he seems to relish. He's got an opinion - that the single currency is an immediate threat to this country's national democracy and must be stopped - and in true Yorkshire style he's not going to shut up and go away.
Like his political antithesis, Arthur Scargill, Paul Sykes has an abrasive manner that winds up friends and enemies alike. His attitude is that of a cornered man who simply cannot keep quiet in the face of what he sees as imminent national disaster. If this means getting peoples' backs up with a bit of plain speaking so be it. Maybe one day Yorkshire will provide a political voice that is gentle, persuasive, warm and winning. But Paul Sykes is forged from hard-tempered steel and hard-nosed business acumen. And he's a Yorkshireman. And you know what Yorkshiremen are like...
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You can donate to The Marie Curie Cancer Care charity through their website here. The Eiger summit has been a tremendous initiative; congratulations to all involved.© Jude Calvert-Toulmin.
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