Ah, the internet, home of unfounded unprovable rumours, based on a book-plugging article by a New Statesmen reporter in the Indy. Slight problem - he started at Carlton in July 1994, and married his wife in June 1996; but let's not let facts ruin a good scurrilous libel, shall we?
As a side note, Carlton's consortium won the digital franchise, which became OnDigital (launched in 1998), but it later folded due to lack of subscribers.
Do I detect a slight note of bitterness and, perhaps, envy there? If someone made the same comments about someone from the "working class" who was successful in politics, they would be, quite rightly, accused of being "a snob" - I think the same thing is true in reverse - you appear to be judging a person by the circumstances of his birth. The Class War is so last century
What I have found since I moved from the private sector to the publicly-funded sector is that there were ways of getting more for the same - better resource utilisation, using more cost-effective suppliers, and cutting out a lot of manual processing that could be work-flowed through IT systems and process engineering; there were/are so many things done in a certain way because they have always been done in a certain way.