“We have a whole campaign now to do to develop the brand,” he says. “We’re looking at the brand, deciding how we will brand ourselves. If we are going to develop major fund-raising we need to get the brand out there. If you went out to Kensington High Street and stopped six people and said ‘do you know anything about Imperial College,’ they probably wouldn’t.”The new rector is an exquisitely tidy man who has an office that gleams with cleanliness One feels he has an equally tidy mind. It is a surprise to learn that he left school at 16, having found lessons boring (he studied for his A-levels at night school).

But once he had become intellectually engaged, he never looked back. After achieving a first-class degree at London University, he moved to Bristol to do a PhD and became an academic before jumping ship to Glaxo at the age of 30.When he became chief executive of Glaxo in the Nineties, he showed breathtaking audacity in launching a successful takeover of Wellcome Takeovers are not on the cards at Imperial. Sir Richard is expected to concentrate on building the college up to be London University’s heavy hitter The business school is an important part of his game plan. Imperial’s graduates need to know about the world of business, about entrepreneurship and balance sheets, he says. In the past they didn’t.By all accounts, the new rector’s restructuring of departments into four faculties of life – science, medicine, engineering and physical sciences – has not been popular with all academics. Sir Richard has a reputation for toughness and there is talk that he has not carried all the academic staff with him. Sir Richard, however, says it won “total support” from senior managers People recognised the need for change, he says “They are smart.

They recognised that the whole sector had started to change dramatically.”The restructuring means that individual departments may lose out. With a subject such as mathematics, which in its pure form is about blue-sky research, it is not always easy to see results. With biological sciences and other subjects – which have brought us the Human Genome Project and gene therapy – it is. The fear of some departments must be that they will suffer financially and politically from being consigned to jockeying for position alongside other departments within their faculty.The new rector has plenty of fans cheering him on, however. “We need more Richard Sykeses at the top of our higher education institutions to bring additional business expertise,” says Richard Brown, director of the Council for Industry and Higher Education.Unsurprisingly, Sir Richard advocates much more of a free market system for UK universities. “That’s what will bring the competition and drive excellence,” he says.