BAE Systems' shipbuilding technology head, Kevin McLeod

There’s a cold northerly wind blowing through Portsmouth Dockyard, and it’s taking Kevin McLeod back to his earliest days in the shipbuilding business. ‘I landed up in Barrow in the winter as a 17 year old, wearing every single piece of clothing my mum had packed for me, building launchways for the second of the Trafalgar-class submarines. The only way we could get warm was to climb up the scaffolding into the anchor recess and get a 30-second blast of heat on your top half, because it was being preheated for welding.’

McLeod, approaching his first anniversary as engineering director for BAE Systems Surface Ships - he took on the role at BVT Surface Fleet, before it was acquired by BAE - has certainly seen many sides of the defence industry. Unusually for someone in such a senior role, he spent his entire 26-year career up to that point as a civil servant, joining the Ministry of Defence (MoD) as a technician apprentice after his O-levels, and acquiring all his further qualifications on the job.