For a “ferocious remainer”, Alex Cresswell is remarkably proud of his blue passport. For some, the dark rectangle on his office table is a sad symbol of Britain’s departure from the EU. But while the Thales UK boss describes watching the Brexit squabbles in Westminster from his decade-long posting at the company’s Paris HQ as “excruciating”, he smiles at the travel document.
His aerospace-to-defence-and-security business is four years into a Home Office contract to produce the passports, after Gemalto (acquired by Thales) undercut the furious incumbent, De La Rue, to win the contract.
Does he see the blue cover as a symbol? “Luckily, I don’t. It’s a commercial contract – I don’t decide what colour it should be,” he says, allowing the Observer to flick through to see a respectable passport photo with his familiar side parting. So far, 24m have been produced.
“It’s extremely important because it puts us in every citizen’s pocket,” says Cresswell. “We don’t hold citizen biometric data and our cybersecurity was good enough that the risk of being breached was [low]. These were the reasons we won: ironically, because we were producing a more sovereign solution than the incumbent British company.”
Although not a household name in the UK, Thales jostles with the titans of defence and aerospace across Europe – Boeing, Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo among them. The group, which counts the French government as its biggest investor, raked in revenues of €18.4bn (£16bn) in 2023. In the UK – one of the company’s biggest markets, where it employs 7,000 people – sales rose 18% to €1.2bn.
Thales’s disciplines are varied: there’s weapons-making, including missiles and launchers; the contract for sonar systems for the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines; designing the Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers; and space operations in Oxfordshire and Bristol, working on the Lunar Gateway (in effect a service station for deep space travel in the moon’s orbit). Much of its output is deeply technical: radar systems and cybersecurity kit.
In Britain, defence accounts for most of its business – and is growing rapidly. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022, the group’s shares have gained more than 80%, its value has swelled to €33bn and its order book has reached a record high, at €45bn.
Missiles made by Thales in Belfast have been supplied – via the Ministry of Defence (MoD) – to fighters in Ukraine, to shoot down Russian jets, drones and helicopters, and to hit tank targets. “They’ve been used to great effect in defending Ukraine,” Cresswell says. Sales have doubled since just before Moscow’s invasion, and he expects them to double again in the next two years.
So does he have any qualms about benefiting from a war in which thousands have died? “I don’t see that I’m profiting from misery. I see the opposite: by being prepared, I’m averting more misery.”
The boom in defence shares has been stoked more recently by conflict in the Middle East. Several of Thales’s UK sites, including Glasgow and Doncaster, have been targeted by pro-Palestinian protesters, throwing paint and carrying hammers. The company has a joint venture with Israel’s Elbit to deliver unarmed Watchkeeper drones to the British army. Meanwhile, anti-war demonstrators regularly protest at UK defence firms.
“It’s a peculiarly British thing that we uphold our armed forces, but simultaneously despise the industry that produces things that will protect them or make them more effective,” says Cresswell.
His office, moments from Buckingham Palace, was General de Gaulle’s wartime headquarters, and an inscription on the exterior declares: “Vive la France!”
That country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has urged the EU to be bold in defending Ukraine amid concerns over the US’s commitment. Meanwhile, a long-running row over the size of UK defence spending continues, with parliament’s spending watchdog, the public accounts committee, warning this month that the MoD has not credibly demonstrated how it will manage its funding to deliver the military capabilities the government wants.
“We should be preparing ourselves much more for the threat that is posed to our society. History shows that by preparing, we’re less likely to be in a conflict,” says Cresswell. “I haven’t felt as uncomfortable and uncertain about the threat to the UK as I have since the end of the cold war.”
It was against that backdrop that Cresswell’s future was forged. His father was a production chemist working on the commissioning of factories and refineries. The job moved Cresswell around, giving him a “Heinz 57 schooling”, in Cambridgeshire, South Africa, the US and Hertfordshire.
In 1970s America, he began building radio-controlled planes, inspired by a neighbour. Later, a trip to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington cemented his path. “That was it: I couldn’t do anything other than aerospace or aviation,” he recalls.
He began his career with eight years at British Aerospace (now BAE) in Stevenage as a guided weapons systems engineer. He joined what would become Thales in 1992, holding various positions, including running its land defence division. In early 2020, he took on the top UK job.
Should defence spending be prioritised over, say, the NHS? “Do we prioritise how long we wait for a hip replacement higher than the threat of our national infrastructure being brought down by a cyber-threat? Very difficult comparison to make.
“There’s a societal discussion which is absent because of 40 years of peace and prosperity. My parents knew the privations of war – the threat of war was much more present in their lives.”
Thales is in line to benefit as technology makes warfare both more complex and less about boots on the ground. Last month, the defence secretary, Grant Shapps, awarded it a £1.9bn contract to use AI to predict when maintenance is needed to keep British warships and submarines at sea for longer, amid concerns about the amount of time Royal Navy vessels have spent in port due to malfunctions.
Its AI is also being used to support air traffic controllers in optimising flight sequencing, reducing fossil fuel burn in the process. But Cresswell cautions: “There are rules of engagement and accountability: you’re not going to have a machine making decisions to use lethal force.”
Thales also finds itself at the centre of an international tug of war over the Aukus pact – the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the UK and the US.
Australia scrapped a submarine project with France when it joined Aukus, angering Thales’s benefactor. But Cresswell says Thales has sovereign status in all three Aukus countries, and he has high-level security clearances. He adds that the pact is attracting talent, as the “most exciting” event since the 1958 US-UK nuclear weapons treaty.
With regard to his space business, Cresswell admits tech billionaires have reshaped the industry. Elon Musk’s Starlink project – satellite internet arrays in low Earth orbit – have shaken up the market, but “for military and infrastructure applications, low Earth satellites are much more vulnerable”, he says. “To some extent, it’s like how Uber was going to be the death of conventional taxis but in fact the market just grew.”
CV
Age 60
Family “Married to an artist”, with four adult daughters and two granddaughters.
Education “I collected O levels: 14”, then aeronautics and astronautics at Southampton University.
Pay Undisclosed. “I think I’m paid correctly for what I do, and the responsibility I have.” Is it south of €1m? “Oh yes.”
Last holiday Provence, France. “There were two umbrella pine trees which mercifully stopped my drone from obeying the instruction to return to the last programmed home – in Hampshire!”
Best advice he’s been given “My father-in-law told me: ‘Whatever you might want to do in the future, whoever you might think is right or wrong, don’t forget to do your day job.’”
Biggest career mistake “Being lazy in French at school. My colleagues would be quick to tell you my French is far from brilliant.”
Phrase he overuses “That’s good enough for government work – usually to stop it being overengineered.”
How he relaxes “Cooking local food at home in our eco house, which we had built.”
