Theo Paphitis talks construction

Paphitis in a minute...

I couldn’t live without…
My family. Mrs P and I have three grown-up children, two sons and a daughter, and 13-year-old twin daughters.They think I’m desperately uncool: Oh God, everything to do with me at the moment in their eyes is like, eeuuggghhh. But when they want something, well that’s a different story.

The biggest problem we face is…
Public sector cuts. At the moment we have a deficit of something like £200bn a year, right? How are we going to pay it back? Now I’m just a poor little immigrant boy with no qualifications but even I know we have to do something drastic. How then, according to the present government, is it all going to be okay? It’s codswallop. Everyone knows the only way we are going to sort the £200bn worth of deficit out is to make £200bn worth of cuts. This will have a huge effect on the construction industry, as I’m sure it well knows. It’s a race for the work now, isn’t it?”

The thing that makes me feel the most guilty about my carbon footprint is…
I won’t be alive long enough to know whether I have made a difference.

I never leave the house without…
My mobile phone.

The best city in the world is…
London followed very closely by New York. When I go away and come back, I think London is marvellous and when I’m in New York, I love the hustle and I love the bustle.

My favourite building is…
The Chrysler building in New York

My least favourite building is…
City Hall. That turd that has been dropped on the South Bank.

Something nobody knows about me is…
I think about the previous day’s events when I’m shaving.

Read the full interview in Building at Coffee with a dragon: Theo Paphitis talks construction.