Hal Miller

Who is Hal Miller?

Sir Hilary Duppa "Hal" Miller, known as Hal Miller, is a British Conservative Party politician.

Educated at Eton College, Miller graduated from Merton College, Oxford in 1956 and the University of London in 1962. Following colonial service in Hong Kong, he served as Member of Parliament for Bromsgrove and Redditch from February 1974 to 1983, and for Bromsgrove from 1983 until he retired in 1992. He is a former vice-chairman of the Conservative Party.

After retiring from politics, he joined the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the trade association of the motor industry in the UK, as its chief executive. He modernised and transformed the somewhat staid society by introducing and implementing a strategy of commercialisation.

After a four-year term, he resigned from SMMT to become managing director and later chairman of Cosmopolitan Textiles Limited, a UK-based subsidiary of the Hong Kong textile conglomerate Mingley Corporation with a brief to take the company into the auto industry. This was achieved successfully as a second tier supplier of patented substrates, mainly for headliners.

In 2005, he became a key supporter of Project Kimber. This had been formed to keep MG sportscars British after MG Rover's entry into administration in April of that year. Following the surprise sale of the entire assets of MG Rover and its subsidiary Powertrain Limited by the administrators, PricewaterhouseCoopers, to Nanjing Automotive Corporation against letters of credit to the reported value of £55m on July 22, 2005, Project Kimber developed a new business plan. This focussed on a key element of the original MG plan, which was to acquire the rights to produce and sell a rebranded and re-engineered version of the successful smart roadster, that had sold at a rate of 15,000 cars per annum in Europe for the previous two years, from DaimlerChrysler.