The £380m fund guru who loves to give money away
. . . now he’s invested £30m in a gloriously bonkers plan to revitalise the North East
THoUSANDS will gather next month in the North east town of Bishop Auckland to watch a gloriously eccentric spectacle unfold – all of it the product of the madcap mind of City fund manager Jonathan Ruffer.
For 14 evenings, a 90-minute long night show depicting 2,000 years of British history in 24 scenes will be staged at a cost of £30m, funded from Ruffer’s own pocket.
The extraordinary event, known as Kynren – a play on an Anglo-Saxon word meaning family – will, he believes, help revive a deprived and depressed part of england near where he was brought up.
As if Kynren were not quixotic enough, he has also bought a set of paintings by the Spanish master Francisco de Zurbaran housed in Castle Auckland, the historic seat of the Bishops of Durham, to stop the Church of england selling them to a Ukrainian oligarch.
oh, and he ended up buying the castle too. Just as well, perhaps, that his net worth is estimated at £380m. It is, he acknowledges, ‘utterly, searingly bonkers.’
His motivation? ‘I love people and I particularly feel for the people who, bless them, are the soggy bottoms, who just haven’t got what it needs to elbow their way up the greasy pole.’
The castle and the paintings – of Jacob and his 12 sons – are part of his grand visions for putting Bishop Auckland on the global map.
A Christian, Ruffer, 64, has given them back to the people of the North east, where he intends to create one of the world’s most significant centres for Spanish art. There will be a gallery with an el Greco purchased for £2.5m as well as the Zurbarans, plus long-term loans from the Prado gallery in Madrid.
Ruffer, who wanted to be a vicar before going into fund management, admits it sounds a bit dotty.
Kynren tells the story of england, seen through the eyes of Arthur, a ten-year old boy from the North east, who kicks a football through the Bishop of Durham’s window and then is taken on a journey through time from the Roman era onwards.
‘There is a three-acre lake in the centre, and at one point, out of that lake comes a full-size replica Viking ship and standing on it are Vikings,’ says Ruffer, sounding like a small boy himself.
‘They have been under the water as frogmen. Just before they come up they rip off their diving suits.’
MoRe than a thousand locals appear in the epic show, having rehearsed for their roles for a year. There are a couple of star turns too: the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres is doing the voice of Pope Gregory the Great and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is voicing the part of St Cuthbert, an important saint in the early Northumbrian church.
Is there a contradiction between his faith and his profession as an investment manager, I wonder?
‘I give my money away out of fear, of being shackled psychologically by it,’ he adds. ‘I don’t want to be a cardboard cut-out of a rich person.’
‘I see my faith in very practical terms, I think God has a calling for everybody and that is discerned in prayer. I spend a long time praying, to keep my compass in order.’
Ruffer has been highly successful at his calling as an investment manager.
His firm looks after around £18bn for investors, a large chunk of which is what he calls ‘old Rectory money’ – from comfortably-off private clients with between £500,000 and £1m to invest, along with holdings for charities and pension funds.
He is, however, highly critical of his industry, describing it as ‘absolutely disgraceful, because we are based on a dishonesty, that we know what the future holds.’ Having said that, he does claim to have foreseen the credit crisis and as a result to have made money even in the worst year, 2008.
He has, he declares, delivered positive returns for 20 of the 21 years that his Ruffer Capital business has been going – last year being the exception. He says: ‘It is extraordinarily difficult now because everything is massively over-valued.
‘I absolutely saw the crisis coming. We predicted very early that the mortgage market in the US would be where it would start, we could see it start to break down in the autumn of 2006.’
Ruffer made money out of it, he says, by spotting that the mania that had taken hold for borrowing money in Japanese yen and Swiss franc would have to go into reverse. Suffice it to say that he was proved right. ‘It was terribly easy,’ he asserts – though plenty of his competitors failed to see it.
Are we at risk of another catastrophic event? If one is of a melancholy disposition, which I am, it is always easier to see the fragility of everything all the time.’
‘What we will see is a rerun of the Seventies when the equity market lost 90pc of its value, but it completely got rid of the debt. By 1983 the country was debt-free and ready for a Thatcher revolution.’
Whether or not Ruffer’s schemes do in fact bring some prosperity back to County Durham remains to be seen, but a report commissioned by the Auckland Castle Trust from ernst & Young suggests they could generate £20m a year and create more than 400 jobs.
What does Ruffer himself think? ‘I have got a nice smile. I can encourage people and I can unite people. Don’t underestimate that.’