Roundhouse saviour Sir Torquil Norman: My vision for a ‘country not fit for purpose’

Published: 03 June 2010
by DAN CARRIER

THE toymaker who transformed the fortunes of the Roundhouse is to publish his memoirs.

Sir Torquil Norman will pull no punches in a book which will lay out a blueprint for Britain and a route out of recession.

The philanthropist who bankrolled the renovation of the famous venue in Chalk Farm, turning it into a charitable arts centre, wants to change the attitudes of Whitehall policymakers.

A former fighter pilot, Sir Torquil accuses the government of creating a “nanny state” in the book Kick the Tyres, Light the Fires, published next week. 

Its title is an old RAF saying used by fighter pilots as they shook off hangovers and clambered into cockpits.

In the book, the man who helped disaffected youths in Camden Town will warn that the country is one of the most unhappy nations in Europe. His charity, the Roundhouse Trust, has now helped more than 20,000 people in 10 years, giving them new skills and training in the arts and media. He now wants to see his project rolled out across the nation.

“When I began thinking about writing this, what became blindingly obvious almost immediately was how appallingly badly we are being ruled,” he writes.

“The impression one receives is of total amateurism in most areas of running the country.”

His plans range from setting up a series of Roundhouse-style educational ventures to detailed changes to the tax system. Many of the ideas – such as scrapping taxes for people who earn £15,000 a year or less – stem from research produced by right-wing think-tank The Tax Alliance and the government’s new work and pensions minister Iain Duncan Smith, who spent his time away from Whitehall managing the Centre for Social Justice, which claims to promote “caring Conservatism”.

While Sir Torquil attacks the Gordon Brown government, criticising the complexity of the tax credit system and claiming there has been an increasing tendency for people to become wholly reliant on benefits, he says he is apolitical. The Thatcher years are attacked for causing division and allowing public institutions to wither.

“The country is not fit for purpose,” he says. “We can either just coast along, accepting things as they are, or get on and do something about it.”

He savages the criminal justice system, calling the prison service “neolithic, overcrowded... with little capacity for rehabilitation”.

Instead, young criminals should be sent to outward-bound centres in the wilds of Scotland and Wales run by tough marine commandoes. “These young people could live a hard outdoor life and learn survival skills, thereby becoming more self-reliant, tough­er and finding ways of looking after each other,” he writes.

The book includes an autobiographical section covering his time as a fighter pilot in the RAF through to working for banks, then on to setting up his own company, Blue Bird toys, which produced the Big Yellow Teapot and Polly Pocket dolls. 

He tells of his eureka moment in the bath when he decided to use money from a charitable trust set up with the help of his wife Anne to buy the Roundhouse. 

• A full interview with Sir Torquil Norman will appear in the New Journal’s Review section next week.