Fattest of the fat cats ready to usurp Brexit
WHAT kind of person could breezily compare overturning the greatest democratic exercise in this country’s history to changing holiday plans because of the weather?
For that is what Mark Malloch Brown, the chairman of the Best for Britain campaign did when defending his decision to take £400,000 to use for the campaign to reverse the Brexit vote in a second referendum.
‘It’s like being told “let’s go to Cornwall for a beach holiday and it’s going to be sunny” and it rains every day and you’re allowed to change your mind,’ he told John Humphrys on Radio Four’s Today programme as he laughed off the suggestion he was trying to subvert democracy.
What kind of person? The answer is someone who has never been accountable to voters, yet has spent his working life on the global corporate and bureaucratic gravy train.
The son of an exiled South African diplomat, Malloch Brown was educated at Marlborough College (boarding fees currently £36,525 a year) and Cambridge.
He went on to join the international bureaucratic elite, with posts at the World Bank and then the United Nations, where he rose to the level of deputy secretary general.
At the UN in New York, Malloch Brown forged ties with George Soros, and after leaving the organisation he was appointed to senior positions at Soros Fund Management (the tycoon’s investment company which has $26billion of assets) and Open Society Foundation. He became a peer on his ministerial appointment. As a member of the global elite and arch Euro-fanatic,
Brexit is seen as an abhorrence and the 17.4million people who voted for it are simply pawns who can be turned around with campaigns unded by his billionaire friends.
STEPHEN PEEL
BOTH having worked at Goldman Sachs, Stephen Peel and his Russian-born wife Yana are one of the most glamorous power couples in the City. While she runs a London’ gallery, for a long time he was a leading figure in the private equity world – earning billions of pounds in profits for his employers. An ally of Soros over many years, Peel, 52, wrote a doom-laden article titled Why Leaving The EU Will Likely Make Britain Poorer.
Peel’s first big job was with Goldman Sachs and then, in 1997, he joined TPG, one of the world’s largest global private investment firms. In the ensuing 17 years, he helped the company’s assets grow to $60billion. As for his relationship with Soros, he sits on the boards of the Soros-funded Institute for New Economic Thinking.
MARTIN SORRELL
NO chief executive refuses to take his phone calls, while his sonorous opinions on all manner of subjects – particularly on Brexit to which he is so firmly opposed – have made Sir Martin Sorrell a favourite of the BBC and a regular on Question Time, Today and Newsnight. Even when his company’s shareholders were rebuking him for his ‘obscene’ £48million pay packet last year, he arrogantly took to the airwaves. For pugnacious Sir Martin can rarely resist the chance to burnish his credentials as the world’s most famous ad-man.
Yet the chief executive of advertising giant WPP was being uncharacteristically quiet yesterday after it emerged he was among a cabal of Remainers linked to a campaign to re-run the referendum.
His Twitter feed was inactive and there were no appearances from him on the TV talk shows that last month were lining up to record his every utterance on the global economy during the World Economic Forum in Davos. Sorrell is said to have a personal fortune of some £500million.