IN WHAT seems like another life and another world, I spent a year working outside the office of legendary hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin. One weekend he offered to take a few of us golfing at a prestigious course in Illinois. On the limo journey, he gave each of us a copy of Jim Collins’s newly published Good to Great book on business.
‘It’s all about the people, Ian. Get the right folks on board the bus and the bus will drive itself. Get the wrong people and lessons will never be learned. The bus will go over the cliff.’
I never finished the book: it became a bit of a dry read, and like many business books was rather evangelising. Still, the point Ken made stuck with me.
A quarter of a century on, and a year after I returned to the UK, Ken’s words returned. Rishi Sunak had taken over, and the northern part of HS2 was being cancelled. During the announcement I heard a Treasury official mumble a fraudulent apology: ‘Lessons have been learned’.
The very same day I read an economist friend’s Substack piece about how Sunak and Sir Tom Scholar, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, had financed our entire covid debt at short-term rates. This has resulted in the largest loss in British financial history. Some £211billion was buried, hidden in Bank of England accounts. This remains unknown to the public. Forget Rachel Reeves’s paltry £22billion black hole. Staggered, I wrote to the Treasury under a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to discover how on earth that decision was arrived at. In the meantime, ‘Sir’ Tom had quietly been moved off the scene of the crime, retaining his title and huge pension. About a week later, I received an obfuscating reply explaining that it was all OK: that when interest rates came back down to zero again the extent of the loss would reduce markedly. At the end were the words: ‘lessons have been learned’.
Furious at such levels of unpunished incompetence I decided to join Reform in May last year, sending my CV and offering to help in any capacity. By now I was living in rented accommodation in St Leonards-on-Sea in East Sussex and studying to change direction to become an independent financial adviser.
Five days after the snap election was called, I received a phone call.
‘Are you interested in standing for Bexhill and Battle constituency, Ian?’
I’ve always been an adventurous type and I thought, ‘what the hell, I need a fresh challenge’ and I really wanted to help correct the disastrous trajectory the country is on. Little did I know what was to come.
You may know the next bit. Some off-colour and sarcastic comments I made to an arch-feminist and a conjecture about Lend Lease were dredged up in the media’s typical re-animation of medieval ecclesiastical purity testing.
During my campaign, I was introduced to the disaster of the Northeye ‘refugee’ detention centre in Bexhill-on-Sea. I familiarised myself with the financial detail at the time and once again was staggered and appalled at the incompetence and very real possibility of corruption and cronyism surrounding the project.
The election came and went and despite the media smears I garnered a respectable 16.6 per cent of the vote, losing to the parachuted-in Conservative. I agreed to serve as Reform’s chairman in the area, while returning to my studies.
A few weeks later I noticed an article in the FT about Northeye. The National Audit Office had returned a report cataloguing colossal ‘errors’ which had raked in an almost 300 per cent profit for the developer in just 13 months.
I leafed forensically through the report a day later, my mind exploding at the total of £100million losses nationwide, something the Public Accounts Committee recently called ‘staggering waste’ because of ‘a dysfunctional Home Office culture’. By chance, I looked up and noticed our constituency’s new Tory MP Dr Kieran Mullen on the television. I was just in time to hear him say ‘and with regard to Northeye, lessons have been learned’, a phrase that he repeated in interviews with the local press.
I’m sure by now you’re getting the picture. I did more work. The Post Office scandal, the loss of £1bn by Thurrock Council on a solar scam, Brighton’s bankrupt ‘Eye’ observation tower and many other multi-million-pound council failures. At a national level there are the regulators OFGEM, OFWAT and the Pension Regulator. On my numbers we are now getting close to £700billion in losses, almost one third of our national debt, through unaccountable state bunglers. But sticking to the script, in every case an official is recorded espousing the ‘lessons have been learned’ mantra.
Over Christmas, I discovered the main Post Office in Bexhill was earmarked for closure. Being the good financier I like to consider myself to be, I went over the Tory privatisation and the accounts. The Royal Mail division, the most profitable and highest growth division (given the volume pickup in online parcels) had been flogged off for less than one third of its value. In the years that have followed £1.7billion has been extracted in dividends while over £4billion has been generated in operating profit for the new investors. More than enough to keep the lights on in every directly owned Post Office in the UK for decades.
Ironically Kieran Mullen MP has begun a petition to keep the Bexhill Post Office open. He appears completely unaware that his party is the direct cause of its woes, but no doubt sees an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the local people. Again, I’m just waiting for him to tell us ‘lessons have been learned’
You see, Ken was right. The lesson that really needs to be learned is never to allow incompetent people to drive the bus. This is why I continue to support Reform.
