So I done an economics over at the Fistful, swinging off a a data at JW Mason’s.
Meanwhile, is there anyone in this list who isn’t an embarrassment? Some journo should obviously ring them all up and ask if they will confirm they are domiciled in the UK for tax purposes, but to be honest, why bother when one of them is actually the former Railtrack CEO, Gerald Corbett?
Another uses the title “The Hon.” and seems to be the guy who hired David Cameron at Carlton TV. Yet another met the heir to the Cadbury fortune at Eton and is now spending it making pubs terrible. There’s the guy from the barely-even-faking .com outrage Knutsford. (That reminds me. When that was going on, I remember discussing it a university acquaintance’s rich dad, an entrepreneur from Manchester, who memorably described Michael Edelson as “a thief” having done business with him.) There’s the posh PR whose dad was the boss of Topshop. Himoff the telly. Samantha Cameron’s old boss.
Cassie Hutchings is described as CEO of GCH Capital – those would be the initials of the chairman, Greg Hutchings. Yes, that’s Greg Hutchings who was sacked as CEO of Tomkins for spending the shareholders’ money on four private jets. It’s intensely Cameron – a collection of the dodgy, the vacuous, people who picked the right parents, plus a bit of late-property bubble glamour. But above all, it’s a list of his mates, the You Scratch My Back And I’ll Scratch Yours PM.
The best that can be said for the list is that the Philip Green on it is the Philip Green from Carillion, not the one who gave the company to his Monaco-domiciled wife and keeps his money in somebody else’s Swiss bank account. But I did have to check.
Update: How did I miss this? Of course Karren Brady is a director of the other Philip Green’s holding company! OK, we’re done here.
It winds me up when the BBC makes such a big point of one hundred businessmen supporting the Tories, especially given the nature of many of them. What if one hundred unemployed people wrote to the press urging people to vote Labour?
Or indeed a hundred union leaders? It’d be spun as “problematic” for Labour.
It winds me up that none of them get asked about the EU referendum, because few of them support it…
That little model of the labour market is absolute genius.
I notice Tidjane Thiam, last seen charming the crowds in fluent Schweizdeutsch, hasn’t exactly put his money where his mouth is when it comes to “Britain is open for business”
It’s also kind of amusing that at least two of those people can’t vote in the UK because they are Americans.
In case anyone wondered, Cassie Hutchings is Four Jets’ daughter.