By Anthony Henson, August 6, 2025
Jaguar Land Rover, now little more than a legal fiction, recently dispensed with its CEO, Adrian Mardell—a technocrat with a fondness for spreadsheets, whose tenure, like so many in the age of the managerial class, amounted to little more than balancing the ledger while the edifice crumbled. Installed in 2023, Mardell was hailed as a saviour during the post-pandemic supply chain crisis. The company posted its first profit in a decade. But profit, in the end, is not redemption.
His true legacy will not be found in the balance sheets, but in his complicity with the systematic erasure of Jaguar—a once-iconic brand, hollowed out, repackaged, and sold as a “reimagination.” This reimagination, draped in the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion, was not an act of creation but of corporate euthanasia, a final, cynical act of branding before the machinery moved on.
Jaguar, like so many cultural touchstones of the 20th century, could not survive the storm of postmodern consumerism. It was born in an era that still believed in craftsmanship, in grace, in permanence. Those values have no place in a world governed by financial algorithms and quarterly earnings. Under Ford, Jaguar never turned a profit. Under Tata, it became a relic on life support. Its global sales peaked in 2018 at 180,198 units before collapsing to just 59,000 in 2024. The pandemic did not kill Jaguar. It merely delivered the coup de grâce.
The Hollowing Of A Once-Great Symbol
The rot began long before. Jaguar’s decline is a story where heritage is strip-mined for marketing narratives, where soul is sacrificed at the altar of efficiency, and where beauty is displaced by utility.
In 2020, Thierry Bolloré, an MBA and an avatar of the global managerial class, was installed as CEO. Like so many of his kind, he confused spreadsheets for vision. His great plan—likely dictated by his handlers at Tata—was to transform Jaguar into a luxury brand to rival Bentley and Rolls-Royce. This was not strategy. It was theatre. It was a burial in ceremonial dress.
When Bolloré was removed, Adrian Mardell, a long-serving company man, was given the seat. For a moment, there was hope that Jaguar might chart its own course, that the script might be rewritten. It was not. Tata had already written the ending.
Jaguar would become an all-electric brand. A grotesque DEI-branded concept car, the Type 00, was unveiled—a contorted, joyless sculpture that bore no relation to Jaguar’s lineage of grace and restraint. It was the final act of corporate desecration. Jaguar, once a name that conjured images of E-Types slicing through winding roads, was reduced to a shallow symbol of brand repositioning.
Mardell, for his part, was never the author of this vision. He is a creature of finance—men who read data like scripture, who search for certainty in graphs and metrics, who speak in the cold dialect of commercial viability. They are, at their core, soulless administrators of decline. Mardell’s only gesture toward creativity was dyeing his hair blond—a futile attempt to humanise the functionary.
What has occurred at Jaguar is emblematic of a wider decay. An institution once animated by passion and purpose is now reduced to a husk, repurposed for investor relations and ESG scores. Those placed at the helm are not leaders but functionaries, chosen for their willingness to obey. The Jaguar CEO is not a visionary. He is a custodian of the brand’s slow demolition.
Tata is the architect. The script is written in boardrooms, far from the assembly lines, far from Coventry’s legacy, far from the history that once gave Jaguar its soul. What remains is a name, a logo, and a story repurposed for the marketplace—one more ghost in the graveyard of cultural memory.