Is running Royal Mail the most impossible job on the FTSE? | Royal Mail

As he sprang up on screen delivering another cheery missive from his car, Simon Thompson had a touch of the travelling salesman about him. It was early 2021 and the former Ocado executive was touring Royal Mail’s offices not long after taking the top job there, addressing his 100,000 new charges by video with his familiar “hi team” refrain.

Fast forward to late 2022 and thousands of angry postal workers dressed in bright pink high-vis clothing were thundering outside parliament, shouting “we want Thompson out”. A school child on the picket line sang ditties urging his departure. The regular perky videos to staff, seen as red rags to the Communication Workers’ Union bull, had been quietly ditched.

Now, with a pay deal and commitments on working patterns and leave policies agreed after a year of union talks, Thompson has resigned. The company will report its annual results on 18 May.

Onlookers claim his tenure fits an all-too-familiar playbook at the 507-year-old business. “There’s a repeat pattern,” says one former board director. “The chief executive arrives thinking they can bring change, plays nice with the union for a while, agrees a pay deal in return for change and then that change is not implemented. Then the pattern starts again.”

Here’s how each boss has handled the lucrative but difficult job over the past two decades:

Adam Crozier (2003 – 2010)

Adam Crozier became chief executive in 2003. Unlike his immediate predecessors, Bill Cockburn and John Roberts, who rose from Post Office telegram boys, the ex-boss of the Football Association was an outsider. Sources say Crozier brought a calmer, tie-less and less formal image to the role. Insiders say he set a new tone, starting early and finishing by 5pm to return home to his family.

He was appointed by the former Asda chief Allan Leighton, who became the company’s longest-serving chair, holding the post from 2002 to 2008. “He would climb up on chairs to address the troops. He was a blunt, charismatic manager and the union responded to that,” says a former colleague. Leighton even became one of the few Royal Mail bosses to face down a threat of industrial action, as members failed to back a strike in 2003. Nonetheless, he took on a series of battles over pensions and post office closures, and failed in a mission to stamp out bullying within the organisation, a problem still causing conflict in the workforce today.

But in 2007, relations soured amid fears over job cuts, the CWU demonstrated with placards reading “sack Leighton and Crozier” with a cartoon of the pair mocked up as Laurel and Hardy. Despite identifying that parcels would become an increasingly important part of the business in the internet age, Crozier left for glitzier climes at ITV before tackling that issue. Shortly after his departure, Royal Mail was declared “balance sheet insolvent” without the support of the public purse.

Moya Greene (2010 – 2018)

The Canadian became the first non-Briton and the first woman to hold the position on arriving in 2010 from Canada Post, where she had trebled profits but had difficult relations with unions. (At the end of her tenure, a union published a report card in which they graded her F for respect.)

Greene was hired to revamp the group, with Royal Mail split from the Post Office, which would later agree to settle with 555 claimants over the Horizon scandal. The government was then accused of selling off Royal Mail too cheaply, floating it in 2013. Greene brought her chief of staff at Canada Post, Emily Pang, to do the same job at Royal Mail. “Emily was her emotional intelligence,” recalls the former director. “You’d make a joke at a board meeting and Emily would have to explain to her it was a joke. Moya was a strange mix: stroking the fur and ingratiating with people like MPs, or like Alex Ferguson at Man Utd, screaming at you.”

Greene stayed in post for eight years, collecting more than £12m and delivering significant shareholder returns but failing to significantly address the shift away from mailing letters and the rise of rivals taking market share in online retail parcels. Unions even depicted her in campaign literature as The Grinch stealing Christmas.

Rico Back (2018-2020)

The German, the first of two semi-internal appointments, stirred controversy on arriving in 2018, as he was handed a £6m “golden hello”. His decision to commute from his Swiss penthouse with views of Lake Zurich also caused anger in the workforce, handing him the nickname “the flying postman”. (Later, the union mocked his absence from its London headquarters with a Where’s Wally? cartoon.) A terse battle with unions over his restructuring plans dominated his short tenure, and the business fell into the red before the pandemic. Royal Mail was ejected from the FTSE 100 and Back was ousted with a £1m payoff in May 2020.

Simon Thompson (2021 – 2023)

He was appointed by Keith Williams – the chair and former BA boss who had been minding the role – after a period as a non-executive director. Thompson had flitted between digital roles, most recently handling the much-criticised £37bn Covid test-and-trace scheme, and his experience was later questioned by Back.

Thompson enjoyed a honeymoon period, as lockdowns fuelled a boom in online retail deliveries. The shares rallied, and the company rewarded investors including the Czech tycoon Daniel Křetínský with a £400m dividend, angering unions demanding a pay rise. The resulting acrimonious relationship with the workforce and run of strikes in the crucial period around last Christmas, and a car crash select committee performance earlier this year, would lead to him being accused of “incompetence or cluelessness” by MPs.

International Distributions Services, Royal Mail’s parent company, said it was in the “advanced” stages of appointing a new boss, with Thompson staying until October. The likely next candidate is not obvious. Williams stepped in last time on an interim basis but Friday’s statement suggests a repeat is unlikely, while the commercial chief, Nick Landon, knows the business well but has not held a chief executive role. The former board member says: “The unions always play the man, not the ball. Targeting the boss until they leave, and the whole thing starts again.”