The Duke and BENNY THE BON VIVEUR BANKER
He’s gone from a tough housing estate to high finance, via Celtic FC (and five wives). As Bernard Higgins prepares to take over the running of the Buccleuch business empire, the truth about...
ON the face of it, they seem unlikely bedfellows. One hails from the upper echelons of the peerage, a product of Eton and Oxford who can trace his lineage back directly to Mary, Queen of Scots. The other grew up the son of a merchant seaman in a city tower block and counts as his mentor a grandfather who once stood for election for the Socialist Party.
Nevertheless, Richard Scott, the 10th Duke of Buccleuch, will next month officially hand power over his vast portfolio of land and companies to his anointed successor, the five-times married Scottish banker Benny Higgins, whose profile is easily as colourful as any of His Grace’s vibrant tweeds.
Higgins is one of Scotland’s most successful businessmen, yet he remains a figure of fascination among the stuffy, private school-dominated Scottish financial community. They rake through his chequered love life and unconventional back story – the working-class roots, an abiding love of the arts, and prowess as a youth player with Celtic which could have taken him in a very different direction.
Taking the helm of the Buccleuch Group, which handles the business interests of the Buccleuch family across one of the largest privately owned estates in Scotland, must surely have raised the odds of encountering fresh snobbery. Not on the Duke’s part, Higgins insists.
Although ostensibly men of very different temperament – the Duke will celebrate 38 years of happy marriage this year – Higgins says he and ‘Richard’, as he calls him, hit if off from the moment he joined the group’s board six years ago.
‘Even though Richard and I grew up in very different environments, when we spend time together and talk about the world, we see things very similarly. I think we might be kindred spirits, unexpectedly so perhaps,’ he told the Mail this week.
‘What we think matters in life is very similar. It’s about making sure that whatever you do, you do with a sense of pride. You’ve got to be ambitious but you’ve got to do so with very strong values in place and have real respect for everybody you deal with, whatever circumstances you find them in.
‘Those values and that desire to do things for the right reasons has been the foundation for a very strong relationship.’
However strong the bond is, Higgins has been left in no doubt about the towering additional demands on his already stretched time that overseeing 217,000 acres of prime agricultural, commercial and tourism development will make.
After touring the Duke’s Scottish estates to press the flesh on Wednesday this week, it was off on Thursday’s red-eye flight to Birmingham to meet his new colleagues at Boughton – the Duke’s Northamptonshire pile, dubbed the English Versailles – then heading to London for more meetings before catching the last flight home to his fifth wife Sharon (a former business journalist) at their home in Edinburgh’s New Town.
HIGGINS will take over as executive chairman after the Duke’s 65th birthday and the Duke’s elder son, the Earl of Dalkeith, will become deputy chairman. ‘I expect an evolution from where we are,’ Higgins says. ‘I don’t expect dramatic change but, hopefully over time, people will look back on it and see the right things did move along.’
The punishing schedule appears meat and drink to this poetryloving bon viveur, whose love of the high life is near legendary.
It was rewarded last year with his first listing in Who’s Who, which detailed his membership of seven private members’ clubs – including the Groucho Club, The Ivy and 5 Hertford Street in London.
He is also the chairman of the National Galleries of Scotland.
The present Mrs Higgins has posted several times on social media about their jet-set lifestyle and love of Italian holidays.
All the wives and constant socialising makes one wonder whether he struggles in his own company.
‘I’ve been single and lived on my own from time to time,’ he protests gently in his soft Glaswegian brogue. ‘But I like company generally. I like people and I enjoy being around people.’ Good people, he says, make for good business. Now 59, his clubbable personality helped him through the fallout from four failed marriages and senior roles at Royal Bank of Scotland during the rollercoaster years of Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, and at HBOS as it sailed towards the financial crash.
He left HBOS with a £2million golden goodbye after less than two years’ work as head of retail business, after his decision to run a conservative mortgage-lending strategy came under fire.
As events unfolded, even his critics conceded he was justified in sticking to his guns, prompting one journalist to write: ‘He must be the only banker who was fired for being right!’
Higgins is philosophical about that now, saying: ‘A sense of being defeated will serve no one well and you need to get on with your life. I had to stand by the values that I thought were important but it didn’t work for me there.’
On the eve of the crash, he joined Tesco Bank, which he ran for a decade until February last year.
That period, too, was not without incident – Higgins sat on the retailer’s executive committee as it spiralled out of control under the leadership of Philip Clarke.
In 2015, Tesco reported an annual loss of £6.4billion, one of the biggest in British corporate history.
That same year, it was revealed he had spent more than £18,000 on London taxis in eight months.
The expenses included trips to upmarket restaurants and the Royal Opera House – as well as journeys to and from Tesco’s head office in Hertfordshire. It was front-page news.
Yet, Higgins’s ability has never been in doubt and he insists he has ‘no regrets’ about his time at the bank, which quietly grew to serve more than 8million customers and employ 4,000 people.
THE Scot’s love life has also hit the headlines. He married his first wife, Catherine, in 1987 and was still with her when he met second wife Emily. In the early 1990s, while still married to Emily, he met Christine, who was then married to his friend, Martin McArthur.
The pair wed in 2002 but the marriage lasted only four years and they divorced in 2007. By 2011, he was married for a fourth time to Virginia, a former deputy director of HBOS, when he became embroiled with Catherine in a wrangle over a £2,000-a-month reduction in his monthly child support payments. The mention of this is the only occasion when his voice stiffens noticeably.
‘There were demands being placed upon me that I felt were unreasonable,’ Higgins says. ‘You’ve got to have the courage of your convictions.
‘I can guarantee you that within the levels of my economics, I’ve always supported my children and, indeed, ex-wives, to a standard I am entirely satisfied with.’
Yet there was nothing about his childhood that suggested he was destined for this life less ordinary.
Young Benny grew up in a high rise in the Toryglen district of Glasgow – his family was one of the first to move in when the tower was built in the late 1960s.
He has a clear memory of walking back from the ice cream van the first night and their flat was the only light on in the 20-storey
block. ‘It’s one of those images I’ll never forget,’ he says.
It was one of a series of important firsts in his life – academically and physically gifted, he was a promising footballer in his younger days and was on Celtic FC’s books at the same time as the great Charlie Nicholas.
While he captained the famous club’s youth side, he failed to make the grade at the top level and instead became the first in his family to attend university, studying mathematics at Glasgow, where he achieved a first class degree before sailing through the arduous training required to become an actuary.
‘I went to Holyrood Secondary, and I loved it,’ he says. ‘It was the same school my dad Jimmy was expelled from. He became a merchant seaman at 15 and when I was 16, and we were debating something, he would always remind me that by my age he had been round the world twice.
‘My dad, who died in 2004, always wished he had chances he didn’t feel he had got. He was never somebody to say “well done” or “you better pass that exam”, but it was obvious it was an unsaid expectation. I responded to that, to a degree. I have one brother who’s three years younger. He’s a bookie.’
So, both boys were good with numbers, they just used their skill in different ways. Are they both gamblers, too, one wonders? Perhaps, after four failed marriages, there is a sense of the impulsive about Higgins, the notion that this time the numbers will fall right.
‘At my wedding to Sharon, one of my friends asked my mum, “Molly, what word would you use to describe him?”. She said, “Determined”. She’s probably the best judge. When I was a student I was incredibly diligent and used to make sure I worked hard at the right times. I played a lot of football, but I made the most of my non-football time to study.
MY MUM would say, “Oh son, you don’t need to study so hard”. Her objective in life was always to make sure you were happy, healthy and content. That was much more important than any other form of success.’
His love of culture came from his maternal grandfather, Tony Mulheron, a larger-than-life character from the Clyde shipyards who was a lifelong activist in the Socialist Party of Great Britain.
‘He once stood as an MP,’ says Higgins, who learned about books and art at his heel. ‘He was a voracious reader. One of the things he said to me was, it’s by engaging with literature, poetry, music, art that you can experience things that are beyond the parameters of what you are born with or have lived through. That made a big impression on me.’
At one RBS event in honour of Maya Angelou, Higgins recited from memory I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The old socialist would have applauded, but what would he have made of his progeny teaming up with a Duke?
‘I think he would have been proud that I was prepared to do the right things and work with people who have strong values,’ Higgins says.
‘He was a man of great intellect and hugely curious. I was only 21 when he passed away just a month before I graduated and one of the few regrets of my life is that he wasn’t at my graduation.’ Higgins didn’t give much thought to a career until his final year at Glasgow, when he was thinking of doing a PhD, possibly in the US, ‘just as a bit of an adventure’.
AN ACTUARY gave a talk about his work, stressing how hard the exams were. ‘That sort of appealed to me, plus I think I wimped out and instead of going to America or London, I joined Standard Life in Edinburgh. It wasn’t a life plan,’ he says.
He spent 14 years at the insurance giant before moving to RBS in 1997, then to its Scottish rival HBOS in 2006. His time at Scotland’s two biggest banks coincided with the boom years.
Rapid expansion made Scotland’s financial services industry the envy of the world – until it all came crashing down. Higgins’s reputation survived intact, and he is now involved in setting up the £2billion Scottish National Investment Bank to be an innovative lender to higher-risk small businesses and ‘mission-led projects’, mainly in the low-carbon industry.
This weekend, Higgins and his wife will jet off to see friends in the Italian city of Bologna. It is a period of calm in a whirlwind life – one of personal highs and lows.
‘That’s part of my story,’ he says. ‘I’ve got six beautiful children and two beautiful stepchildren and I’m married to an amazing woman. I would not have predicted this as my life 30 years ago. I don’t have regrets per se, but everybody’s life is an interesting one – mine maybe slightly more so.’