It says something about the competitive nature and determination of Sir Rocco Forte that he is trying to get into the British triathlon team for his age group for the world championships, which take place next July.

The 56-year-old gets up at 6 a.m. every morning and trains for two hours.

"I have always exercised. If you've got a goal, it forces you to drive yourself a bit more," he says.

It is the same competitive spirit and determination that saw him launch the RF hotel chain just one year after he lost control of the Forte hotel group to Granada.

The hostile takeover of Forte, Britain's largest hotel group, which had been built up by Sir Rocco's father from a single cafe, is now the stuff of corporate folklore. At the time, it was reputed to be the bloodiest in British corporate history. "It certainly was high profile," he says. "There was a PR war going on, so there was a lot in the papers about it and it didn't just stick to the financial pages. It moved to the other pages and, in fact, there were several editorials. It created quite large emotions."

Sir Rocco says he was surprised by Granada's bid because the company was not in the hotel business.

"I thought they were bloody mad. And I thought we would be able to fight it off, which we tried very hard to do."

But the bid by Granada, led by Donegal-man Mr Gerry Robinson, eventually succeeded after a hotly-contested battle. Granada was publicly backed by fund manager Mercury Asset Management, which held 15 per cent stakes in both companies. It did not back the Forte family's plans to rationalise the under-performing business. It is something that clearly still rankles with Sir Rocco.

"I was very irritated with them because when I became chairman I'd had a conversation with them about what needed to be done and they were quite blunt about some of the issues and the weaknesses of the company, which I recognised and agreed with. I actually took a lot of action and all of the things I said I was going to do, I did."

Such comments and others he made in the past that Granada allowed the Forte hotels to become run down would also suggest that Sir Rocco is still smarting over the loss of his empire. However, he says Forte customers still write to him complaining about the standards in the hotel group.

"Some of them write to me because they don't know I'm no longer involved. I'm not bitter, because bitterness is a silly thing. All it does is eats into yourself. I just think it is an objective look at the situation. I have moved on."

Granada paid top price for Forte - a 70 per cent premium on the share price before the bid, according to Sir Rocco.

"It was worth standing up to them because if I hadn't stood up to them, they would have got it relatively cheaply," he said.

"The only thing I would have done differently is blowing my own trumpet a bit earlier, because I think things were starting to go very well and perhaps I wasn't aggressive enough in my PR to sell this to the marketplace. I'm always very much a believer that what you do should speak for itself."

A recent analysis by The Financial Times in conjunction with CSQuest.com, the online share valuation service, said Granada's £3.92 billion (€4.98 billion) takeover of Forte appears to have created little or no value for its shareholders. Does he feel vindicated by this report?

"Vindicated up to a point," he says. "I think what is sad is there was a very good company, potentially a great company, a big player in the international hotel scene, which could have become one of the premier groups, if not the premier group in the world, and it has disappeared. So, from that point of view, it is very sad. What was it all about? What was it all for?"

Despite such sentiments, he adopts a somewhat accepting view to the whole episode.

"Anyway, it is water under the bridge and it's part of the capitalist system to which I am a great subscriber. If you have free markets, those markets have got to operate and occasionally there are casualties out of that."

His capitalist credentials are backed up by his support for Thatcherite policies. Like many in Britain, particularly in the Conservative Party, he has little time for the EU. He was one of a number of prominent businessmen who signed a letter to the Sunday Times as part of the campaign for an independent Britain and opposing economic and monetary union with Europe.

His stance has not changed over the years and he says he does not see "any merits at all" in Britain adopting the euro. Britain is different from the rest of Europe, particularly in business culture, he says.

"I operate in Europe and I operate in the UK and I see the big contrast. I see the high-tax regime, I see the difficulties of employing people, the labour laws which make it difficult to manage effectively. I see all of those things and contrast the UK to them and it is a much easier playing field in the UK."

He says Britain's legal system is different and its labour laws are more favourable to employers, a factor he says has led to low unemployment.

"Because if you can dismiss people, you're prepared to employ them. If you can't dismiss them, you're very careful about who you employ."

Sir Rocco's resigned manner to the loss of the business his father built up suggests that perhaps there is something behind that now-famous remark made by his sister Olga in a newspaper interview that he lacked a "human chip".

"It was taken out of context. It was a throwaway remark," he says. "During the takeover bid, when we lost, everybody was in tears and I was the one getting everyone together, but that was my job. I already had my little cry elsewhere and, when I was there, somebody had to put on a brave face and I think she meant it in that sense."

In a perverse way, he says the takeover bid worked to his advantage.

"Funnily enough, it made me in a way because, in the way we defended ourselves against the bid, suddenly people saw there was more to me than they thought. Here was a guy who was much tougher than anybody expected."

Just months after Granada's takeover, Sir Rocco raised £1 billion in the City to try to buy back Forte's luxury hotels from Granada.

"How could I go into the City and raise a billion pounds immediately afterwards if people considered me not capable of what I was doing?"

When the attempt to buy the luxury hotels came to nothing, Sir Rocco decided to set up his own group, starting with the acquisition of The Balmoral in Edinburgh. Through acquisition and construction, the RF group now has seven hotels.

The aim of the RF Group, he says, is to create an alternative to the luxury five-star hotels run by the big names and to provide the individuality and quirkiness of privately-owned hotels with the facilities and bookability that the chain has to offer. Luxury hotels are about the delivery of personalised service to the guest in an environment that is sophisticated and exudes class and quality, he says.

"I dislike this thing about major groups where every hotel they build is basically the same, no matter where it is in the world. The idea of a luxury hotel is that it should be different. So, what we try to do with each hotel is build in a feeling for the city in which it is in."

He says Dublin is a city the RF Group is looking at but no decisions have been made yet.

Does running his own group allow him to step out of his father's shadow, particularly given comments made at the time of the Forte takeover about him being his father's son and not chairman of Forte on his own ability?

"That's not my primary motivation for doing it," he says. "I'm doing it because it is a business I enjoy and like, and I get a lot of pleasure out of it."