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John Foster, Islington’s new chief executive
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Parents – they may not mean to, but they do...
PARENTS, it is said, can mess up your life. The poet Philip Larkin famously said something along the same lines, but in more blunt language.
I thought about this recently in the very last place I expected to – the sequestered confines of a large Town Hall office.
Opposite me, across the long polished table, sat the comfortable figure of Islington’s new chief executive, John Foster – broad face alert, searching eyes, a man used to being in charge.
It was his life story that made me think of Philip Larkin.
As it unfolded, I thought it would be difficult to find a rougher childhood.
When his parents split up he was six – his mother had run off with a younger man, leaving his father, a skilled steel worker in Middlesbrough, to look after him.
A few months later, the boyfriend of a baby-sitter beat him up.
Beaten up? You mean smacked a bit, I asked?
“No, I was beaten with a strap,” said John.
The six-year-old must have been in a bad way because the social workers in Middlesbrough stepped in and put him in care.
That’s where he stayed until the age of 18.
He saw his father from time to time but his mother disappeared until one day he was called by an official at Barnardo’s orphanage and told his mother wanted to see him.
He went into the principal’s office and saw a woman with another man. It was his mother, but he couldn’t recognise her.
“It was a strange moment,” he told me. “And I’ve always remembered it.”
Somehow this man, who had such a rough upbringing, went on to take a degree in sociology and then began what turned out to be a successful career in the civil service.
In the past 30 years he has been chief executive of Middlesbrough as well as Wakefield authorities.
Somewhere in between, in the mid-1970s, he served on a special government committee. In those days, John, now 59, wouldn’t have wanted to talk so freely about his early life – certainly not to a journalist whom he had just met.
But culture and society have changed so dramatically over the years that people feel less awkward in talking openly about their personal lives.
He spoke quite fondly about his parents.
Whatever he may have blamed them for as he spent his years in the orphanage, all the sadness and anger appear to have evaporated.
He could have cursed his parents and what life had thrown at him, but somehow he put all that behind him, compartmentalising his feelings until they were of little or no significance. You could just say, he simply got on with his life, and made of it what he could.
You have also got to realise that he rose to Olympian positions in local government at a time when society was much more class-stratified, and people of his background hardly ever made it to the top. He must have done it simply through grit, determination – and intellectual ability.
His appointment as chief executive of Islington is to the credit of the selection panel of Lib Dem and Labour councillors.
He had only been in the job for six days when I met him on Tuesday afternoon, part of an exercise of meeting people – hence his approach to the local press. The evening before, he had – unusually so, for a chief executive – given a talk to the Labour group of Islington councillors.
He wants to achieve something in what will probably be his last job before retiring from the civil service – or, as he prefers to put it, from public office.
He talks about trying to put flesh on the aims of the council – to reduce “inequality” in the borough, cut the pregnancy rates among young girls and persuade Turkish and Somali men who are such heavy smokers to give up the habit.
Six days into the job, he can only talk, understandably, in generalities.
But I wasn’t thinking about that when I walked out of the Town Hall into the sunshine, but only of what had happened to this man, and how far he had travelled in life. |
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