Misfit Victorian finds nation shallow and short term

For a man rated as one of Britain's leading businessmen, even as its top entrepreneur, James Dyson takes extraordinary pleasure and pride in proclaiming his naivety. And his childishness, his contrariness, his sheer, cussed perversity, his delight in being different for the sake of it.

Perhaps the roots of this syndrome in a 51year-old multimillionaire with an enduring, loving marriage, three children, three homes in England and one in Provence lie in his struggles against banks, venture capitalists and government ministers over 15 years from 1979 to bring his brilliant invention, the dual cycline vacuum cleaner, to market.

Mr Dyson must have felt especially vindicated last weekend after Fujitsu confirmed Britain's new status as "a branch-sector economy" by closing its £500 million-plus semioconductor plant in Sedgefield, with the loss of 600 jobs - the latest in a series of foreign investors to pull out of Britain. Mr Dyson can't understand why the taxpayer funds foreign firms to come to Britain and with good reason: in 1992, the Welsh Office turned down his bid to set up in its depressed valleys because it doubted his company's viability.

But maybe the roots of his syndrome lie even deeper, in the personal odyssey of the third child of academic parents, one of whom, his father - a classics teacher at Greshams, the Norfolk public school - died when he was nine.

He became a design engineer "without even a physics O-level to my name". His ghosted autobiography, tellingly titled Against The Odds, glories in his misfit status, "a stubborn, opinionated child desperate to be different and to be right. . ."

Even now, when his privately-owned company is turning over £200 million a year, making £19 million in profits last year and opening a £20 million research and development centre funded from its own cash reserves, he indulges in what he calls "manic diatribes" against all and sundry. He hates the City and its short-termism. And advertising. The education system. Thatcherism. The Dome. Gordon Brown, the strong pound and high interest rates.

Increasingly, too, you feel he is frustrated beneath the cool look of the man in T-shirt and jeans, the classic 1960s Royal College of Art graduate turned unconventional entrepreneur. It's partly that he is an inventor and small businessman forced to run a growing company that turns out 10,000 vacuum cleaners a day, more than half the British market by value and around a third in volume, and sees its expansion abroad - he's setting up subsidiaries in France, Germany, Japan, Australia and the US, where two licensees are already running up sales of $300 million (£207 million) a year.

There are now eight directors in the boardroom, four of them with hands-on management roles and four in advisory capacities, like Richard Needham, the former Tory minister. Mr Dyson now talks more often about eventually selling the business despite his resentment at his previous treatment from venture capitalists and investment bankers who couldn't understand his fascination with anything as boring as vacuum cleaners or with manufacturing.

He loves manufacturing, the combination of work by hand and brain that made Britain the world's great industrial power - even though, he asserts, it's widely viewed as "a slave camp" now. The new 80,000 sq ft R & D centre at Malmesbury, Wiltshire, is, he says, a "very major statement to recreate on a much bigger scale" his business's origins in a converted Georgian coach-house near Bath. A quarter of his 1,050 British employees (average age, 25; many raw graduates) are or will be working here in secret on new technologies and new products to be unveiled next year.

"R & D and engineering are absolutely at the heart of the business and, I think, ought to be at the heart of any manufacturing business because the product is the whole raison d'etre of the company," he says. He hopes Labour, and particularly the Department of Trade and Industry, will put its money where its mouth is in terms of backing R & D and innovation as well as offering greater tax relief for all firms and is so far encouraged by its willingness to consult people like himself. But he's worried that it is swayed by the allure of advertising. PR and the like. "This is the heart of England's problem. We're far too keen on the superficial and far less concerned about the nitty-gritty. There's this general obsession with style over substance and dislike of the long term and that's all summed up for me in the Dome, a gravy train for designers."

While he retains faith in Tony Blair to send a different message ("He's still got time"), he makes plain he felt "jilted" when the British Prime Minister set up his creative industries committee and he was not asked to serve. "Typically, they took on a record producer, a film-maker, a fashion designer and a publisher. This is sending out the wrong message. Industry, manufacturing, is a creative act in itself and people are already attracted by businesses like film and music. What we need is to attract them to making products, engineering and technology.

"We should be making ourselves a powerful manufacturing nation making wonderful products and stop being in awe of the Japanese and Germans who are not better than us. I know manufacturing's share of output has dropped from 35 to 25 per cent so many don't think it's important but it's the engine-room of the economy and, unless it's a vital sector, we will lose all our know-how and ultimately our services sector will decline as well."

He shoots out another naive idea: "And that's why I think we should have a two-tier VAT system, with a lower rate for manufacturing than for services." But the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he asserts, does not think manufacturing is important or else he wouldn't abuse it with the strong pound and high interest rates, forcing businesses either to export at a loss or to import other countries' products. "I can't believe Gordon Brown understands the logic of what he's doing or else he would realise the damage he's inflicting and the way he's encouraging people to go abroad. Perhaps if we had any sense we would move all our production to Taiwan or China, but I don't want to do that, I prefer to think long term."

Such thinking lies behind the new R & D centre whose activities Mr Dyson says will include developing new technologies for other electrical goods beyond vacuum cleaners. But he also remains determined to press ahead with work on adapting his cyclonic filtration system to diesel exhausts in order to stop emissions of carcinogenic soots from dieselengine cars and vans. But he says: "I have not been contacted by any car maker or exhaust maker, they're simply not interested.

"We love vacuum cleaners and are quite happy to be in them for the rest of our lives. It doesn't worry us that we're a one-product company," he says, not entirely convincingly. Instead, you get the impression he's on the cusp of deciding the future of not only his company but his own career and life. "Money will restrict our areas of expansion but I'm not that desperate for growth for growth's sake. If we have a good new technology idea then we really want to go with it. . . I'm not interested in growing the company but in trying to do things differently and having a naive approach is great. You get a tremendous sense of pioneering in doing that. . ."

But, as you watch him talk to his staff, or inspect work on the new centre, you get a sense of restlessness in this self-proclaimed misfit out of synch with the times, a displaced Victorian philanthropist/entrepreneur, a would-be Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Perhaps it's just that modern Britain - which has turned Brunel's Great Western Railway workshops in Swindon into a retail village - is too unambitious, too unadventurous for him. Or that, at heart, he wants to return to his roots as inventor and entrepreneurial adventurer.