DURING our lives, many people influence us. For me, from my early teens to my 20s, my life revolved around sport, competitive swimming and water polo.

During those years, my coach, role model and guide was a remarkable man called Don Newbold.

He was no Mr Average. He was a Great Britain team water polo coach and international referee.

In fact, he refereed at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal and at numerous world championship events.

Any success I had I owe to him and his ability to pass on his technical skills, dedication and will-to-win.

I owe him a lot more than that. Don gave me lessons for life – too many to recall in these few brief words. Outside my immediate family, he was the most important person in my life.

The biggest lesson he taught me was about using those gifts that in varying measures are given to all of us. Every day we see people who have flair, in the arts, sports and public life. They make it all look so easy. What we don’t see of course, are the endless hours of toil that have brought them to such a peak of fitness or competence that allows them to use their natural – or some would say Godgiven – talents to such effect. They are all people who have got the basics right.

That is something that Don taught me and it is a lesson I have tried, far less successfully than him, to pass on to other people in policing and politics.

I didn’t notice it in the 1970s but as I progressed in my working life, I began to realise how much he had taught me. I would find myself regularly thinking about Don and what a role model he had been for me and many other young people, who he had influenced for the greater good.

He was always immaculately dressed and he was an incredible communicator. He had image but also substance. I now realise many of my habits, how I work, even how I dress, come from Don.

Don was a senior executive in Foster Wheeler, a global engineering and construction company. I’ve not seen him for many years and so this week I took great pleasure in helping open the offices of the firm’s new Teesside base at Centre North-East in Middlesbrough.

Foster Wheeler employs 240 people on Teesside. It is the kind of world-class firm that we want in our area. It is the most effective two-word answer to anyone who says we can’t attract the best.

As I walked round the offices with John Cumming, their Teesside operations general manager, Frazer Mackay, their UK operations managing director, and Dave Bramfitt, a senior piping designer, I got some idea of the scale and complexity of their work. They make up the kind of company that powers the economy and that will help to lead the country to economic growth.

I think I also detected some of Don in the firm, in the attention to detail, the commitment to get the best out of people by training and developing their skills and in getting the basics right.

I would have to class myself as one of Don’s minor and probably less successful projects.

Multi-national companies are far easier to manage than human beings.

But I will always be grateful for his lessons in sport and in life. He is in the top five people who have shaped my life, and I was so glad to discover that others had learned from Don Newbold too.