Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Midlands towns to oppose Moulton’s plans. BMW’s dismay at the scale of the protests contributed to Moulton being seen off. The way was clear for John Towers and his Phoenix consortium to save Rover, paying BMW just £10 for the company — the cost of a windscreen wiper blade. The propitious name of Towers’s consortium and a dowry from BMW seemed to herald a new beginning.

Last week, as MG Rover called in the receivers, Moulton could be forgiven for saying “I told you so”. Car production at Longbridge was suspended on Thursday as component suppliers halted deliveries. In the world of just-in-time manufacturing, MG Rover had run out of time. Patricia Hewitt, the trade and industry secretary, broke the grim news of a collapse of a hoped-for deal with China’s biggest auto company.

In truth, MG Rover’s fate was sealed long before. Despite hefty investment, BMW could not turn the company round. After Phoenix took over the car maker it still failed to make a profit. Even if the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) had agreed terms, the cars produced would have been very different. The Rover-driving bank manager had been superseded by call centres and online banking and there was no room for the old-style saloon that had established Rover as a prestige brand. “It is an awful shame but it was always very predictable,” said Moulton. “Our plan was to drop it down to a sports car business, change the technology from steel to composite [and] probably end up with a business of more like 1,000 employees. Reasonable estimates were of revenues of a couple of hundred million pounds and profits of £20m-25m.”

Back in 2000 Moulton, 54, was labelled a ruthless asset-stripper. He wasn’t exactly that. He studied chemistry at Lancaster University where he did a lot of serious car rallying and built a man-powered aircraft. He joined Cooper Brothers to be an accountant then moved to Citicorp Venture Capital. Alchemy Partners was born in 1997 and now claims to have more than £2 billion under management.

True, Moulton’s credentials are more those of a new-style capitalist than an old-style industrialist but Phoenix, the white knight that came to Rover’s rescue, turned out to be not as selfless as it first appeared.

While jobs were undeniably saved, Towers and his Phoenix colleagues, known as the Phoenix Four, soon faced accusations — fiercely denied by them — that they had enriched themselves from the company’s assets. They set up a £13m pension trust for themselves and other senior executives and last year paid themselves a reported total of £15m, a sum that is said to have made them among the world’s highest-paid car company executives.

As the Driving section went to press, Rover was staring into a financial abyss. The company dismissed reports of a £400m black hole in its pension fund, saying the figure was “less than £67m”, but admitted its financial situation was very serious.

“One thing is certain: [under our plan] there would have been no shortfall on the pension,” said Moulton. “It [Rover] would either have failed before now or you’d probably have a somewhat smaller but ascending company, rather than a medium-sized, descending and hopeless [one].”

A £100m bridging loan from the government, which MG Rover had hoped would shore up its debts while talks with the Chinese continued, failed to materialise in time to ward off the receivers.

“Either the government is going to chuck a load of money into it or it’s going to go bust,” said Moulton. “If it ceases trading then that [the cost to the exchequer] goes up by some very substantial amount. You could be talking somewhere between £300m and £500m on the public purse from a failed Rover.

“[But it] can’t carry on trading under these circumstances. Their sales figures were terrible last month and worse this [month].”

As many as 20,000 livelihoods rely on the Longbridge plant, including firms in which Alchemy has investments. “I have three companies in my portfolio that supply MG Rover,” he said. “I don’t take any pleasure in a loss of jobs. But whatever happens there is very little likelihood of Rover being a material activity in five years’ time.”

Moulton’s original plan is seen now by many as the route MG Rover should have followed. Nick Matthews, a senior researcher specialising in manufacturing at Warwick University, said it was a pity Moulton was ignored.

“The only way MG Rover could have made any money was to concentrate on the sports car market. Alchemy’s plans seemed plausible. They were going to slim the company down and sell some of the land assets. Alchemy had to tell its shareholders how they were going to get their money back. Phoenix didn’t have to justify their plans to anyone.”

Ironically, MG Rover made a last minute attempt to sell its MG TF sports car as a separate venture. The two-seater was not part of the negotiations with SAIC, and Moulton was among the investors approached. He turned down the offer. For him, the moment had passed.

Rover, the brand once synonymous with solid English respectability, had struggled to attract new buyers for its ageing models in a market already battling to keep pace with cheaper, mass-produced cars from Asia.

Asked whether MG Rover might have had more success if Moulton had taken over the company, Daniel Ward, a spokesman for the car maker, said simply: “He didn’t.”

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