ITV chief’s jobs made him Hardie

Talking of the new ITV marketing director John Hardie, the Diary can reveal a few interesting addenda to his impressive CV.

This Procter & Gamble high-flier has apparently never worked anywhere else, but now the Diary can reveal that the Glaswegian has experience of the bakery trade (working at the end of a conveyor belt at the Sunblest Bakery in Parkhead in his student holidays), the jewellery business (selling cheap watches to canny Scots) and even the music industry.

Hardie, it emerges, used to go busking to supplement his meagre wage in the streets of York when he was a lowly P&G brand manager in Newcastle, together with Gary Haigh (now UK marketing director of Pizza Hut) and Andrew Glover (senior manager in Sainsbury’s marketing planning department). Haigh fondly remembers a drunk (who didn’t like Bob Dylan) throwing his chips at them, but apart from such hazards, he assures the Diary it was a very lucrative sideline.