A bitterly cold wind scythes across an enormous NCP car park but the pale clouds overhead carry no menace It didn’t rain yesterday and

A bitterly cold wind scythes across an enormous NCP car park, but the pale clouds overhead carry no menace It didn’t rain yesterday and it won’t rain today. Inside, Mr Newton’s office is warm and spacious but plain, with no obvious personal touches; the wall is decorated with a diagram of the company’s pipeline grid and the table is covered with sheets of gloomy reservoir statistics. Sitting with us is Margaret Stewart, who for all her famously large salary is conspicuously failing to restrain her boss.One by one he brings up his betes noires, and one by one he wallops them. Ofwat, the industry regulator? “Well if I have a bitch about the regulatory regime it is this…” The EU directive on waste water? “Nobody, but nobody, has the vaguest idea what that’s about.” The press? “I frankly don’t know what their motives are.” Stuart Nixon and his report? “We’re quite puzzled how Mr Nixon came to that conclusion…” Critical MPs? “I would say this to them: You want to come and do this? Fine.” As the words rattle out, his head goes down and he looks slightly upwards at you, like a rugby hooker heading into a scrum.I ask him about the bath fiasco and he swats at the media – “It was blown up out of all proportion”. He was presenting some water conservation tips at a press conference, he says, and a reporter questioned whether people could seriously be asked to go without baths. “I said, ‘Well I haven’t had a bath or a shower at home since this started.’ That was true.” Well, up to a point.

What he actually said – and was filmed saying – was: “I haven’t had a bath or a shower now for three months.” The difference is significant, given that within 24 hours it was known that he had taken baths, albeit not at home.And what does he think about the calls for a “day of reckoning”? This: “A reckoning for what? At the end of the day we actually came through this situation, which was the most difficult that any UK water utility has experienced, and none of our customers was disconnected.”He warms to his theme: “That wasn’t because we were lucky, it was because we took all the necessary action in order to prevent rota cuts. Our critics obviously want to personalise this – and I accept I am fair game – but they seem to forget that we’ve got 3,500 people in this business who worked their socks off, came up with great ideas, implemented them and actually saved the day. I think the day of reckoning will come when people actually understand what our people have managed to deliver here.”Mr Newton manages, every now and then, to say sorry, but not a we-got- it-wrong sorry, or an OK-it-was-a-mess-but-we’ll-do-better-in-future sorry; something slightly different. If Richard Nixon in Watergate invented the “non-denial denial” which gave the impression of rebuttal without actually addressing the accusation, Yorkshire Water has given us the non-sorry apology, which contains no hint of remorse. Mr Newton is “sorry for the fact that a lot of people have been very worried”. On the baths business, he says: “I regret the way it was dealt with.”This man, you will have gathered, is unrepentant. Courting popularity is not on his agenda, Ms Stewart notwithstanding.

On our way out after the interview she tells me, by way of explanation: “He’s very committed. He feels a great frustration at the difficulty of getting the message across.”The view is widely held in Yorkshire that it is not Mr Newton’s commitment that makes him talk like this, but the fact that the good opinions of his customers do not matter much to him. His job depends on the shareholders, about 80 per cent of whom are financial institutions, and he is putting a good deal of effort into pleasing them, not with charm but with hefty dividends. But this is another view he naturally rejects, and even if it contained some truth it would not be the whole story, for this mood of rawness and defiance seems to be shared widely in the company, far below board level.Yorkshire Water’s employees are, in fact, every bit as angry and aggrieved as their customers, and they are, as a company, virtually without friends. In a manner unusual for officialdom, bodies such as the police and the National Rivers Authority no longer think twice before contradicting Yorkshire Water in public. Last month, for example, the firm said there had been only one road accident involving their tankers. When the Yorkshire Evening Post put this to the police, a spokeswoman declared that she personally knew of four and “there could well have been more” Personally, the staff feel the pressure.