Arron Banks, the godfather of Brexit, takes aim at the British establishment
>> Arron Banks, now 50 and very rich, is an engaging, self-styled “bad boy” who got his start by secretly removing and selling lead from his school’s roof and hawking insurance online to motorcyclists. He is also the person considered, with Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, as most responsible for Britain’s voting to leave the European Union.
In a nearly four-hour interview recently, he happily admitted that he was adamantly opposed to the European Union and that he hated the Conservative Party and especially its previous prime minister, David Cameron. For him, Mr Cameron’s resignation was almost more satisfying than the victory of the so-called Brexiters in the June referendum.
If Mr Farage was the grinning, beer-guzzling face of Brexit, then Mr Banks was its enabler-in-chief. It was largely done with Mr Banks’ money, pugnaciousness and cheery recklessness, which sometimes upset even Mr Farage.
Mr Banks ploughed US$11 million of his personal fortune into UKIP and the unofficial Leave.EU campaign and raised an additional $5 million. Though a small figure by US standards, it made him the single biggest political donor in British history.
The Brexit win thrilled Donald Trump, who saw in that blow to elite complacency and hierarchy a model for his presidential campaign. And it was Mr Banks who exchanged ideas on tactics with Mr Trump’s team throughout their campaigns, making visits with Mr Farage to Trump rallies.
“Never apologise,” he said he had told Mr Trump. “Facts are white noise,” and “emotions rule”.
Mr Banks’ WhatsApp photo shows him with Mr Trump, both giving a thumbs-up gesture.
“We realised we were up against the same kind of enemy and we had to play dirty, and we did,” he said in the interview at Old Down Manor, a Gloucestershire estate hotel he owns.
Andrew Wigmore, Mr Banks’ spokesman, called himself and Mr Banks “the “Provisional Wing of the Leave campaign”, a reference to the Provisional Irish Republican Army.
Like Mr Trump, Mr Banks sees himself as an outsider tearing up what he said was a cozy conspiracy between career politicians and big corporations. He is impatient to initiate a British version of Mr Trump’s “draining of the swamp”.
With Brexit, he said, Britain has had only “a kind of halfhearted revolution” and he is convinced that “the elite” and Prime Minister Theresa May, who opposed Brexit, will end up, after all the negotiating is done years from now, betraying those who want a clean break with Brussels.
The government will “have a halfway house — typical British”, he scoffed. “We need an upending of the establishment and the political system.” (Though not the queen, he emphasised, with a slightly ambiguous grin.)
Mr Banks is considering starting and funding a new citizens’ movement, tentatively called Patriotic Alliance, based on the model of Italy’s Five Star Movement, to gather Leave voters across traditional party lines, perhaps as early as this spring. He openly wonders if UKIP, without Mr Farage and having won its Brexit battle, has had its day.
Though a disrupter, UKIP is now “stuffed” with people who use it as “a piggy bank rather than a vehicle for political change”, Mr Banks said.
Mounting frustration against the Tory government and a Labour Party in disarray has created an opportunity for a political movement that, “like Trump, isn’t left or right but that is radical”, Mr Banks said. He offered a handful of policies, including keeping government small but also nationalising infrastructure, scrapping a national school curriculum until age 13 and forcing the rich to pay more taxes.
“You have 1% of the population of the UK that owns 60% of the wealth, so clearly the system’s broken,” he said. Those are strong words from a man who is thought to be worth between $120 million and $240 million and is negotiating with Hollywood for the rights to his political diary, The Bad Boys of Brexit.
Just this week, Mr Banks started an “anti-establishment” website — Westmonster — modelled on US right-wing sites like Breitbart and the Drudge Report, featuring an article by Mr Farage. Never shy, the night before Mr Trump’s inauguration, Mr Banks, together with Mr Farage and Mr Wigmore, hosted a lavish party in Washington at the Hay-Adams Hotel.
Mr Banks has always fancied himself something of an outsider, having spent much of his childhood in England but frequently visiting his father, who managed sugar estates in Africa. Mr Banks did not go to Eton, as Mr Cameron did, but to what he calls a “third-rate” private school, Crookham Court in Berkshire.
He was expelled from a second school and never went on to college, instead selling everything from vacuum cleaners to houses. He then got into insurance, where he made his fortune.
Mr Banks now has business interests based in the tax havens of the Isle of Man and the British Virgin Islands. He also owns five diamond mines in Africa.