Martin Sorrell: Adland Napoleon meets his Waterloo

Martin Sorrell built up a huge advertising empire with WPP. Now, after 31 years at the helm, he is leaving under a cloud – and his company and industry face unprecedented upheaval. Jane Lewis reports.

As a schoolboy growing up in north London, Martin Sorrell was "a demon batsman getting him out was like breaking the siege of Stalingrad", his old friend, the historian Simon Schama, once observed. That might explain why "even after two weeks of swirling speculation" it still came as a shock when Sorrell abruptly quit last weekend following unspecified allegations of personal misconduct and misuse of company assets, says Matthew Garrahan in the Financial Times.

"Company and man have been inextricably linked since 1987" when the former Saatchi finance director began transforming a small Kent-based maker of shopping baskets, Wire & Plastic Products, into the biggest force in global advertising becoming known as the Napoleon of Adland along the way.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.