Sainsbury, David John (1940– )

English business executive and Labour peer. Sainsbury was appointed chairman of the family business (founded in 1869) in 1992. Under his leadership, the company expanded into financial services, and bought the Texas DIY operation from Ladbroke in 1995, which was integrated into its Homebase operation. Sainsbury retired early in 1998, the company having by then lost its market leading position to rival Tesco, and was appointed to the Labour government as a junior minister at the Department of Trade and Industry with responsibility for science and innovation (serving until his resignation in 2006 It was the first time in the company's history that a member of the family was not an executive director. The Sunday Times Rich List 2008 estimated the Sainsbury family's net worth at £1,300 billion.

Sainsbury dismissed the Tesco loyalty cards, introduced in 1995, as little more than ‘electronic Green Shield stamps’, but was forced to follow suit and launch his own card when Tesco's venture proved to be a spectacular success. In the second half of the 1990s Tesco's lead over Sainsbury steadily increased; when the company's market value halved, it had to issue profit warnings, and Sainsbury faced calls for his resignation. Although a trustee of the former Social Democratic Party from 1982 until 1990, he changed his allegiance to the Labour Party in 1995, and received a life peerage in 1997. When he was appointed a junior minister, Sainsbury transferred his shareholdings into a blind trust.

Sainsbury was founded in 1869 by David Sainsbury's great-great-grandfather as a dairy in London's Drury Lane. The son of a former chair of Sainsbury, David Sainsbury was educated at Eton and then Cambridge University, where he first read history but changed half-way through the course to study psychology. After receiving an MBA from the Columbia Graduate School of Business in New York, he joined the family company as a personnel trainee in 1963. Ten years later, as the company was floated on the stock exchange, he became finance director, later taking part in the acquisition of Shaw's supermarkets in the USA in 1983.

He was chair of the European Space Agency Council at ministerial level; he was also chair of the governing body of the London Business School (1991–98) and a member of the Commission on Public Policy and British Business (1995–97). His charitable Gatsby Foundation, named after F Scott Fitzgerald's 1920s literary character, makes donations to educational and scientific causes, and has funded a cognitive neuroscience unit at University College, London.