In 1975, with the UK newly in the European Union, my husband, Graham Corbett, became senior partner for Peat Marwick Continental Europe (the continental firm of what is now KPMG), a post he held for 12 years and which shaped the insights that made him a European.
Graham, who has died aged 83, developed his team in Paris to show that European cooperation could function well in professional services across 14 countries. His political insight was that our continental friends and colleagues had grown up in the shadow of occupation and defeat. He understood why they saw the EU as a solution for moving on – and why Britons, undefeated in the second world war, were so often unwilling to see the bigger picture.
In 1987, the then Franco-British Eurotunnel recruited him as chief financial officer. Despite the dramas of financial near-collapse, he called it his dream job. More motivating than the UK refrain “you won’t get your money back” was the French slogan: the tunnel construction was un pas de géant (a giant step).
A spell in regulation followed; first he was deputy chair of the Competition Commission, then chair of the Postal Services Commission (Postcomm, now part of Ofcom). The remit to modernise via competition drove the parties involved to war with Postcomm. We would regularly wake to the headline “Corbett must go”. Yet eventually all parties signed an agreement, a success for the consultative strategy that he led.
Graham was born in Bletchingley, Surrey, one of three sons of John Corbett, a senior partner in Peat Marwick Mitchell, and his wife, Greta (nee Sillars). His wartime childhood was spent in north Wales, where his father was seconded to the Ministry of Food to help steer the national rationing scheme. Graham was sent to school at Stowe and was politically matured by 1950s national service on Christmas Island. He was in charge of a motorised vessel monitoring fish potentially affected by radioactivity from the UK’s nuclear tests in the Pacific.
When Graham and I married in 1964 he was a rising accountant in Peat Marwick Mitchell, taking part in interesting jobs, such as the audit of the government of Kuwait, and playing a forthright role in the ongoing debate on accounting standards. Later he was deputy receiver on the Rolls-Royce insolvency. When Burmah Oil collapsed, he was the one to tell Denis Thatcher his services were no longer needed.
In his teens Graham had suffered a spinal injury, which became debilitating when he was in his 40s. The partial paralysis, which Graham stoically refused to see as a handicap, meant an end to some of the things he had loved, such as hiking holidays and sailing. He compensated in part by chairing the Research Institute for Consumer Affairs, an organisation founded to test equipment for disabled people. He came to that world detesting the condescension that so often surrounds disability, so he put his energies, with some success, into campaigning for access for all.
Graham is survived by his sons, Giles and Julian, six grandchildren and me.
