They were words I never expected to hear from Sir Ken Morrison - in fact I nearly had to pinch the Yorkshire Post's business editor David Parkin and he nearly had to pinch me. But there the phrase was in our notebooks, as we clustered round him at the end of a gruelling annual general meeting at which Sir Ken announced he is to step back from day-to-day control of Wm Morrison after the troubled supermarket chain admitted it had no idea about the state of its finances. "Yes, I think it's possible to overplay the Yorkshire hand," he said. Mind you, he prefaced the comment by saying that, naturally, he knew that Yorkshire people were superior to everyone else.
All light-hearted banter (and I hasten to say that I am a Yorkshireman and therefore not coming to the subject from a snooty Southern viewpoint). But the Yorkshire-London culture clash of Morrison Supermarkets' current travails is worth pondering. One of the flaws in the previously error-free career of this 74-year-old magnate has been the unbridled Yorkshireness of his approach since swallowing (and subsequently choking on) Safeways. In fact, we could win the Guardian Unlimited prize for the ugliest word of the year by calling it Yorkshirisation.
That coining would only be following in the footsteps of Sir Ken and his board, who freely use the term "Morrisonising" for what they are doing to Safeways branches. It has grated with the city. Unlike their many predecessors who have conquered the City of London from Yorkshire, from Marks & Sparks to Rowntrees Fruit Gums, they have not made compromises with the way things are done in the Square Mile.
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