I’m the world’s happiest billionaire!
. . . but don’t get Brexiteer businessman Peter Hargreaves started on useless civil servants, ‘buffoon’ Boris – or tax avoiding tycoons like Sir Philip Green
SPEND, spend, spend. The financial freedom to do whatever, whenever. Bathe in caviar! Buy a yacht! Live like a king. Is that what being a billionaire feels like? ‘Actually, it doesn’t feel very different from
not being a billionaire,’ shrugs Peter Hargreaves, wrestling with a complicated coffee machine in the kitchen of his Somerset home. ‘I feel very proud of how successful I have been but, apart from that, things are pretty much the same.’
Hargreaves, 71, is the baker’s son from Clitheroe in Lancashire who went on to amass a personal fortune of £3.2 billion from his financial services company, Hargreaves Lansdown. He is one of the richest men in the UK and lives in discreet splendour in a lush fold of countryside with his wife Rose.
A shareholder but no longer a director or employee of Hargreaves Lansdown, he has just been given a dividend of £60 million from the company he founded in his spare room with partner Stephen Lansdown 37 years ago. Which is nice.
‘Well, it doesn’t burn a hole in my pocket. I don’t really do very much with it,’ he says, although he does support selected charities.
‘Some people think that because they have a lot of money they have to spend it. That has never been part of my psyche at all. I mean, we live very modestly. My wife drives a six-year-old Range Rover and my car is three years old.’ Is he still careful with money? ‘Very. I wouldn’t throw out a pot of yoghurt just because it was past its sell-by date. We never waste anything. For what earthly reason should I be wasteful just because I am wealthy? Yet I can honestly say that I think I must be the happiest and most contented billionaire on the planet.’ In his well-upholstered semiretirement, one imagines that Hargreaves should be living a life of luxury and ease, relaxing on the sunlit uplands of his oodles of cash while indulging in his favourite hobbies of gardening and Egyptology. Instead, he is furious. ‘What are the Government doing?’ he cries. In recent years he has become the Leave campaign’s biggest individual donor, having given £3.2 million to the Brexit cause.
This month he hit the headlines for stating that if a successful businessman such as him were in charge of Brexit negotiations, things would be very different.
‘I guarantee my entire wealth that we would get free trade,’ he said, exasperated by the lack of progress and the fact that talks have been left in the hands of civil servants who ‘don’t have a clue’ and ‘haven’t made a deal in their lives’.
His wife was surprised to hear this on the news (‘Your entire fortune?’ she wondered) but her husband’s conviction can’t be shaken.
‘These people have gone from academia into politics and done nothing of value. How can they have any comprehension of how to run anything?’ he says.
‘But the best option is no deal. That would give us free trade with Europe because the three biggest economies in Europe, outside Britain, are huge exporters to the UK.
‘That’s Germany, France and Italy. And those three economies would absolutely demand free trade from the EU. We just should have said to the EU, we’re gone, goodbye.’
Like many Brexiteers, he loathes the Remainer arrogance prevalent in the Westminster bubble.
‘They think Brexit is a bad idea and that they know better than the populace. But the average person who works in the Nissan car factory in Sunderland is smarter than any MP in the House of Commons.
‘He or she knows how many beans make five. They are smart people, even if they didn’t go to Oxford and Cambridge, Eton and Harrow and all these places. They manage their affairs well and have more understanding of what’s going on in this country than any MP. With one exception. Can you guess who?’ I hope it’s not Boris Johnson. ‘No! The man’s a buffoon. I mean my local MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg. At least he ran a successful business.’ The two men occasionally have a steak-pie lunch together in a nearby pub — Hargreaves in his country casuals, the member for North East Somerset in his three-piece suit. Always. ‘Even if it’s the weekend,’ says Hargreaves, admiringly.
Coffee mugs in hand, we move into what he calls ‘the party room’, which is used for family functions such as his wife’s recent 60th birthday and a cocktail party every Christmas. The couple have two children, 29-year-old Robert and Louisa, 27.
Robert got married in April but the wedding party is to be held here this weekend, where lobster in a Thai curry sauce — the family’s favourite dish from their favourite restaurant in Barbados — will be served to guests. ‘On a bed of rice,’ nods Hargreaves, approvingly.
It is a far cry from when he and Rose married 32 years ago. To cut costs, her father didn’t pay for a lining for the marquee. ‘So you could see all the scaffold poles. We laugh about that now,’ he says.
In his berry-coloured jumper and polished shoes, Hargreaves may have the genial appearance of a sweet old grandpa but you can still sense the steel that lies beneath. After all, here is a man who built an empire but barely ever held a meeting because he finds them ‘a complete and total’ waste of time.
‘The only kind of meeting which is acceptable is where one person speaks. He is telling somebody a set of circumstances and nobody else speaks,’ he says, and I suspect the person speaking was usually him.
Is he the kind of boss who says ‘this is how we are going to do it because I am right’? ‘Yes.’ Yet very few people have created a FTSE 100 company from scratch, without borrowing or acquisition.
Hargreaves Lansdown is the 46th most valuable quoted company in the UK, capitalised at more than Marks & Spencer, Centrica, easyJet, ITV, Sainsbury’s and many other household names. The Bristol-based company is worth billions of pounds and has an enviable reputation in the financial world, where it has achieved the unimaginable — success without scandal. Indeed, Hargreaves pays more tax than almost anyone else in the country.
‘I pay all my UK taxes and there aren’t very many very rich people who do that.’ Why? ‘Because it is an enormous amount of money! But I think if a country has given you the opportunity to be successful and if the tax rates are fair and reasonable, then you should pay the taxes.’
Sadly, not all wealthy businessmen think the same way.
Retail tycoon Sir Philip Green even received a knighthood, despite his complicated tax arrangements.
‘There is someone who has made an enormous amount of money out of the UK economy, but doesn’t pay any tax. His ruse is that his wife is not an ordinary resident and all their dividends and everything go to her. I don’t know whether that is moral or not,’ he says with a shrug.
‘Someone like James Dyson [the inventor] is worthy of a knighthood but look at Stuart Rose, the Marks & Spencer guy. I don’t think the share price was better when he left M&S than when he joined. And now he is Lord Rose!
‘He was supposed to be heading up the Remain campaign but we never saw him! He was useless.’
Neither gong nor knighthood has ever sailed into Hargreaves’s harbour, but he doesn’ t seem bothered.
‘You see, I have never hobnobbed. I can’t stand cocktail parties where people stand around and small-talk. If I don’t even like this person, why am I talking to them?’
His elegant white house has high ceilings and marble fireplaces, plump furnishings and four acres of ferociously well-maintained gardens. He loves his two life-size driftwood statues of horses and the tennis court and bowling green on his 18acre spread, yet he is not one for ostentation or grand living.
On Mondays, he likes to put on his apron and make beef stroganoff from the left- overs of the family Sunday roast.
Yesterday, he turned a near-empty syrup bottle upside down so he could squeeze the dregs over his breakfast porridge this morning.
He makes and bottles piccalilli using produce from his vegetable patch, and even his wristwatch is a relatively modest Blancpain. ‘A few thousand pounds? Certainly less than ten,’ he says.
The only blinging thing in his life is
‘We should say to the EU: We’re gone. Goodbye.’ ‘My father made Scrooge look like a philanthropist’
his £15 million private jet, bought three years ago and parked a few miles away at Bristol Airport, ready to whisk Peter and Rose to Dubai or the Caribbean on a whim. ‘ It’s a super mid- size. It’s not mega-flash,’ he insists.
His absolute pride and joy is his garden, with its parterre, ravishing borders, tropical plants, glorious topiary and the ten ornamental gardens he has created.
Here, a team of three full-time gardeners ensure that not a leaf is out of place and not a path is unswept.
One of his greatest delights is to go out on a cold, miserable winter’s day and pick vegetables for the Sunday lunch. ‘They come up a muddy mess and they evolve into this beautiful food,’ he says.
Last week, he made a ‘combination pie’ from his own freshly picked rhubarb, apples and blackberries. Ever the baker’s son, he made his own pastry too.
‘Sweet pastry this time, enriched with an egg yolk instead of water,’ he says.
He credits his early days working in his father’s shop as the key to his success today.
‘There is no question about it. It’s very rare for someone to have business sense who hasn’t properly seen business when they were younger. You learn all aspects of it. You learn to watch every penny, the most important thing. Businesses that think they are going to be terribly successful and just go out and spend everything? They always go bust.
‘Oh, my father was terrible! He made Ebenezer Scrooge look like a philanthropist. But that was why he was successful.’
T.K. Hargreaves Confectionery, in Clitheroe, sold bread and cakes and supplied local hotels with baked goods.
Little Peter, an only child, helped out by serving in the shop.
He also hand-blocked pastry cases for the mince pies at Christmas and rolled out the hot cross buns at Easter. His mother iced the wedding cakes and later allowed her underage son to use her name to play the stock market when he was still a pupil at Clitheroe Grammar School.
All Peter knew was that he wanted to have his own business.
He trained as a chartered accountant and worked for several firms before moving to Bristol, where he met Stephen Lansdown on the very day he arrived.
‘We complemented each other terribly well,’ he says. The company grew exponentially when they turned it into a dotcom business — ‘my best idea, ever’ — and made both men fabulously rich. Somehow, somewhere along the line, Hargreaves managed to instil the same prudent values into his own children. ‘ We made sure they weren’t the kids who had the most. They saw how we lived and they were very careful. They still are.’ His son Robert now works for his new investment venture Blue Whale Capital. After Hargreaves suffered a heart attack three years ago, he has scaled back his activities but still has various business interests — including a £24 million investment in the Goonhilly Earth Station, a satellite- tracking centre in Cornwall. Once his Brexit beefs are out of the way, Peter and Rose are planning some fabulous trips on their jet. He wants to go to Namibia, to Botswana and to Mauritius, but most of all to Egypt so he can explore the Valley of the Kings. For the moment, there are his son’s wedding party arrangements to occupy his attention. Naturally, he wanted the gardens to be looking their best but the recent drought has meant the expense of frequent watering. It is noticeable that while much of Somerset is parched and yellow, the Hargreaves foliage remain lush and green. ‘We are on a meter. I don’t know how much it’s going to cost but I imagine quite a lot,’ he says. Sometimes, when the sprinklers and irrigation systems were going full blast, the happiest and most contented billionaire on the planet would stick his head into the cupboard and watch the water meter spinning round. How did that make him feel? ‘It grieved me,’ he says.