His parents divorced when he was still young and his mother remarried twice.Morton showed early signs of brilliance, going to Witwatersrand University at the age of 16 to study Classics and mathematics. He then won a scholarship from the Oppenheimer group, who controlled De Beers and Anglo American, to study, first Law at Worcester College, Oxford, and then at MIT. He returned to South Africa and worked for a short time in what was then Rhodesia, part of the ill-fated Central African Federation. In private he was genial, witty, cultivated, relaxed, with a happy home life centring round a wife of 40 years. For the last 10 years he even found time to be a very active chairman of the National Youth Orchestra, “the pinnacle”, he said, “of young classical music in Britain”. His friends were not on the whole from the business community; they included the few journalists he respected, writers, television producers and architects.Much about him can be traced back to his ancestry.

He was born in Johannesburg in 1938, the son of a Scottish oil executive and a mother who came from one of the country’s oldest Afrikaner dynasties, dating back to the 1650s – one of his cousins became foreign minister in apartheid South Africa. Not surprisingly his faxes, phone calls, letters and fights became legendary. His basic philosophic formula was simple: logical analysis followed by decisive action. Nevertheless the key to his character was, as one friend put it, that he was frighteningly intelligent and that he calls a spade a spade he had the gift of telling it like it is He likes a fight.

He recognised that he had had the luck to be talent-spotted at an early age and ensured that he did the same for a younger generation, helping promising young people by promoting their careers – without ever mentioning the fact, for his loyalty to friends and trusted colleagues was total. As he used to say: “Things don’t just happen because you say they’ve got to happen, but because you ensure they happen.”There was a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality about him. If someone wants a fight, he’ll happily take you on.He also saw no reason to suffer fools at all. Included in his contempt were greedy and deceitful contractors, silly questions asked by journalists simply to provoke him, not to mention stupid bankers – he once dismissed the chairman of a major clearing bank as “a bear of very little brain”. Previously Morton had been responsible for a number of successful industrial and financial rescue efforts, but these became overshadowed by his achievements as co-chairman of Eurotunnel from 1987 to 1996. Moreover the enemies he made during his career prevented him from being fully recognised, not just as a brilliant troubleshooter but as one of the outstanding financial and industrial leaders of his generation.He was often described as “acerbic,” a “bruiser”, a “battler”, a “fighter” and indeed he demonstrated all of these attributes when he felt that he needed to. Alastair Morton will be remembered as the man without whom the Channel Tunnel would never have been completed.