Meet Ian Pegler, the man with a plan to revive the Royal Show

But there is more to the showground’s new chief executive than the bumptious manager who drove the celebrity chef to bug-eyed rage with talk of ‘blue sky thinking’.

A turnaround specialist before he returned to Little Chef, Pegler comes across as energetic but principled; someone who will cut out parts of a business that don’t work but genuinely values the staff.

The first thing he stresses is that he is only ‘interim’ - his job was supposed to end next week but he is now staying until February.

The next are the many assets of Stoneleigh - 800 acres of parkland with two exhibition halls, a hotel, conference rooms and wedding venues. Only later does he get round to the Royal Show, and the part it will play in reviving a firm that was almost in administration.

He said: “If you’re a company and you need more exposure and you have one of the most famous brands in the country, you would be mad not to try to use it. Everybody knows about the Royal Show.”

He says the agricultural show - dropped in 2009 as being no longer viable - could return for 2013 but cannot make the same mistakes as last time.

With sponsorship from a major bank and ‘major players’, he foresees a ‘slimmed down’ format of three days and outlines his plan in questions and answers.

He said: “What were the core things that made the Royal Show? Looking at those and bringing them back, putting a modern framework on them. What do the public want to see these days? People want to see how to grow vegetables in their garden, people also want to see where their food comes from, courtesy of Jamie Oliver. Look at what the public want to see, what they need to see, and also some fun.”

In the way that information filters out, Mr Pegler says hearsay suggests that both the Queen and Princess Anne were very disappointed at the demise of the show, but getting royalty involved is not his remit.

He said: “I’m actually quite a low-profile person. I’m not focusing on the royal family, I’m focusing on Stoneleigh Park, how this place can be viable and make a profit so we can reinvest.”

All this talk of the Royal Show may be missing the point. He believes the previous management were “besotted” with it at the expense of Stoneleigh Park’s other strengths.

He mentions two annual events - Grassland and Muck and Pig and Poultry - that are the biggest of their kind in Europe, and two 4WD tracks that are “hardly used”.

He said: “When I mention Stoneleigh Park, everybody associates it with the Royal Show. But we put on 340 events a year. Clearly other people have found it.”

Already he has brought in new sales and marketing staff, and makes clear that although he is not shy of cuts, he likes to involve staff, telling them openly what he feels went wrong and what is going wrong.

This brutal honesty is what made for on-screen clashes with Heston Blumenthal - telling the Michelin-starred chef his pies were not inventive enough - but he insists many of these were down to slick editing and that he maintains great respect for the chef.

Born in South Shields, Pegler was a management trainee with Marks and Spencer before working for Dixons and later Happy Eater and Little Chef in the Forte Group. He went on to turn around two hospitals and a healthcare business, before returning to Little Chef.

The honesty seems to come from his Christian faith. He is eager to talk about how attending a course with other business leaders in 1994 saved him from being a workaholic who neglected his wife and children.

Not afraid to use phrases like “Jesus is the truth and the light”, he adds: “I want to sleep easily at night. If you don’t tell the truth then you don’t sleep easily. When you tell the truth to your people and your customers they trust you more.”