Dyson: UK must focus on growth, not inflation

Billionaire praises Truss and Kwarteng as economy teeters on brink of recession

THE UK needs to focus on growth rather than cutting inflation, one of Britain’s most successful businessmen has warned as official figures show the country is on the brink of recession. In an interview with The Daily

Telegraph, Sir James Dyson said wealth generation and growth had become “dirty words” as he praised the policies of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. He said current political leaders – be they Tory or Labour – were not “going for growth”.

Data published this week showed that inflation had fallen to 3.9 per cent, but the latest GDP figures showed the economy shrank by 0.1 per cent between July and September, putting the economy on the verge of recession. Another quarter of economic decline would mark the first technical recession since the first pandemic lockdown.

At the same time, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published revised data showing it performed worse than expected between April and June. It means that instead of growing by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter, as the ONS had previously estimated, the economy flatlined in the second quarter.

Sir James said: “Wealth generation and growth became dirty words. I’ve always believed that inflation isn’t quite the enemy everyone thinks it is. If you’ve got growth, a bit of inflation doesn’t matter. If you get inflation down and kill growth, I think you’re in trouble.”

He made clear that he much preferred the economic policies of the previous prime minister Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng, the then chancellor –even though they spooked the financial markets and pushed up interest rates.

“I’m disappointed we’re not going for growth,” he said. “I’ve made that plain. I was hopeful [with Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng]. I thought they were doing the right thing – I’m the only one who did. Kwarteng wasn’t raising taxes. He was going for growth, which I think is the right thing. It allows us to pay for things and generates wealth.”

The criticism is not aimed solely at Rishi Sunak – it is also aimed at Labour, the party seen as likely to win the next election.

The Prime Minister has met his target to halve inflation this year after falling from 10.7 per cent at the start of the year. He has also committed to growing the economy as one of his five priorities, saying it would help create “better-paid jobs and opportunity right across the country”.

But the other pledges on inflation and stopping the arrival of small boats across the Channel appear to have dominated government thinking.

The Prime Minister and Jeremy Hunt are now under pressure from Tory MPs to cut tax in order to grow the economy.

On Thursday, government borrowing figures suggested that the Chancellor had enough financial headroom to make £12 billion worth of tax cuts over the coming months.

Sir James also complained there was snobbery about manufacturing that did not exist elsewhere. He said he often travelled to countries where “people want to make things and suppliers want to grow and love manufacturing”.

“We don’t have that here,” he said. “It’s sad. I always blame people like Charles Dickens. Entrepreneurs weren’t middle class, they were lowermiddle class. The middle class and aristocracy never aspired to manufacturing. At school, I was told that if you fail your exams you end up in a factory. Why is banking OK and manufacturing not?”

We’re doing it our way,” says Sir James Dyson, in the corner office of his HQ in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. “People think we’ve gone because we have a head office in Singapore, but all we’ve done is grow here. I’ve invested £1.7billion here in the last five years. We employ 3,700 people. We’ve done nothing but expand and grow. We’ve filed ever more patents here, we pay most of our tax here. But we’re an international business.”

At 77, the fifth-richest Briton, with an estimated fortune of £23billion, is the man who has changed how we clean our homes, cool ourselves and dry our hands. For years he could do no wrong. But more recently he has become a lightning rod for criticism, painted as a hypocrite who advocated Brexit then bunked off abroad. No matter how patiently he explains things, the accusations won’t go away.

Physically, he seems almost unchanged in appearance from the boyish inventor who first charmed the world all those decades ago. Lean, with white hair and a faintly aquiline look, clad in layers of expensive-looking wool, he has the reassuringly patrician air of a public-school classics teacher. The meeting is under the aegis of the

Telegraph’s Christmas appeal. One of the newspaper’s chosen charities this year is Race Against Dementia, the charity founded by the former Formula One driver Jackie Stewart, 84, whose wife, Helen, 82, was diagnosed with dementia in 2016 and now requires full-time care. Dyson is funding a £1.5million, five-year fellowship for Dr Claire Durrant, a dementia researcher at the University of Edinburgh.

Stewart coaxed him into it. “I like Jackie very much, and he is good at making things happen,” Dyson says.

“If he wants to do something, he really does it.” Stewart was persuasive that Dyson was in a unique position to help, by being able to provide state-of-theart equipment as well as money.

Durrant’s work takes slivers of brain tissue donated by consenting patients and subjects it to some of the same techniques Dyson’s engineers are using to develop state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries. A brain is – and this may be an oversimplification – a bit like a battery. One feature of Alzheimer’s is the loss of connectivity between neurons in the brain.

“One in three of us will get dementia,” Dyson says. “At Dyson, we like looking at things ‘the wrong way’, and solving the problems that others ignore, and doing it first.”

But it’s not just about dementia. Ever the salesman, Dyson is keen to remind us of all the other things he is doing. Before seeing the main HQ, I am taken around another vast site on an old airfield in Hullavington, a few miles down the road, home to Dyson’s centre for robotics. I see a fake flat, like an Ikea showroom, where automatic vacuum cleaners are put through their paces. In another room are prototype robotic arms. One day these may be domestic saviours, helping to care for our ageing population.

But not yet. I watch as one gingerly fondles a pashmina and hovers over some plates in a drying rack. Be aware:

dangerous robots, warns a sign on the wall – although it seems the main threat is to crockery.

In Malmesbury, I see the future of haircare, the latest in straighteners and blowers. Beauty is a big part of the business. I see the shipping containerstyle accommodation pods of the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, founded in 2017 to help ensure a supply of engineers. It welcomes 40 students per year for a four-year, fully funded engineering degree, which they complete alongside working for the firm.

All in all, Dyson HQ is an impressive place. The overall message is clear: contrary to what you might have read, the firm has not hightailed it to Singapore, leaving Britain to sort out Brexit for themselves.

In this regard, James Dyson’s recent press coverage has been less than optimal. On December 1, he lost a libel claim against the publisher of The

Mirror. In 2020, Brian Reade wrote a column for the newspaper in which he accused Dyson of hypocrisy. He described him as a “vacuum-cleaner tycoon who championed Vote Leave due to the economic opportunities it would bring to British industry before moving his global head office to Singapore”. Reade argued this set a poor example to young people, characterising Dyson’s stance as:

“Kids, talk the talk but then screw your country and if anyone complains, tell them to suck it up.”

It always seemed like an ambitious case for Dyson to win. So it proved. In his ruling, Justice Jay found that Dyson “cannot demonstrate that he has suffered financial loss as a result of these publications. Nor can he show that his philanthropic work, particularly directed to young people and schools, has been harmed in any way.” Why was it so important to Dyson to fight this column in particular?

“I put a lot of money into the country,” he says. “For someone to say that I’ve screwed the country is deeply offensive. And to say I’m a bad moral example to young children is offensive in the extreme. I don’t mind people criticising me for my political views, don’t mind them criticising anything I do, but that was beyond the pale.”

On the face of it, Dyson ought to be universally beloved in Britain. For many years, he was. But in the past decade, he has seemed truculent, as though the country has not been sufficiently grateful for all he has done for it. It’s true that he remains an almost unique figure here: a British inventor who built a multibillion pound global powerhouse. His story of adversity and triumph is the stuff of business-school legend. He was born in Cromer, the son of Alec, a schoolmaster, and Janet. Alec died from lung cancer at 43, when Dyson was nine.

“I started from having nothing to lose,” he says. “I had lost a father. There is a sort of determination, I think, and [a sense of ] proving something to somebody who exists in the brain, somewhere. Making up for a life lost by my father, something like that?”

The school where Alec had taught, Gresham’s, educated James and his brother Tom for free (James also has a sister, Shanie). As an investment, the decision has paid off handsomely. Dyson recently gifted the school £35 million, taking his total contributions to the school to more than £50million.

His father’s son, the young James liked classics, art and cross-country running. He went to study at the Royal College of Art, but soon discovered he was more interested in industrial design and switched course.

“I was just after David Hockney and Peter Blake and I’m a bit younger than Norman Foster and Richard Rogers [who died two years ago]. It was a revolutionary time; I was lucky to be in the thick of it. Not so much in industry, unfortunately – there was confidence in pop, rock, fashion and art, but a lack of confidence in industry. It’s strange because we had every reason to be confident. Look at what we developed in the war and were developing then: the atomic bomb, radar, the Mini, Concorde.”

He married Deirdre, a successful carpet designer, in 1968, and they went on to have three children. A gallery to house some of the couple’s art collection – which includes pieces by Hockney and Blake – is under construction near their stately home at Dodington Park, Gloucestershire. Dyson is proud of his lineage in British design. An English Electric Lightning fighter jet – salvaged from a scrapyard and refurbished – is suspended from the ceiling of the canteen at Malmesbury; a Mini Cooper, sawn in half to reveal its cross-section, abuts a wall. But Dyson’s most famous work owes at least as much to the visual qualities of pop art as it does to British engineering. There has always been a tension with Dyson between substance and presentation. After college he went to work with the inventor Jeremy Fry, who put him to work designing a flat-bottomed landing craft called the Sea Truck. It was all function, a fibreglass vessel designed to enable shore landings without a harbour.

His next key invention was the Ballbarrow, a Dysonified wheelbarrow with a large round ball wheel. The Ballbarrow was popular – it achieved nearly 50 per cent market share – but it didn’t make any money for its creator.

By the time Dyson came to his vacuum cleaner, he had learned valuable lessons about design, marketing, pricing and ownership. His research started in 1978, inspired by a centrifugal extraction system in his factory. The machine went through a fabled 5,127 prototypes, during which time Dyson and his young family lived on money borrowed against the family home. He founded Dyson the company in 1991 and launched the first vacuum cleaner two years later. The company was in the black from the start and Dyson owned 100 per cent of it, as he does today. While he profits from his successes, he feels the failures, too: his electric vehicle, a project that was conceived in 1993, was cancelled in 2019 without making it to market, after he decided it was going to be too expensive to go up against the motoring big boys.

“Raw engineering is very exciting – think of Brunel or Concorde. But I like doing an unloved product, like a vacuum cleaner, and making it interesting. I’d like you to feel when you’re using a Dyson it’s like a Ducati motorcycle.”

As with Apple products, all the talk of improved function lets the user feel less guilty about spending money on something that looks cool and costs more than the competition. Whatever else he might be, he is a genius marketeer. There is a feminist aspect to his work, too: he has taken products that were traditionally used by women and paid them the kind of attention to detail usually reserved for cars or watches.

This may explain why his politics gets such short shrift. It was disappointing to many on the other side of the argument that James Dyson, debonair feminist inventor in Hockney glasses, turned out to be a Brexiteer. He says he would always have had to move his HQ to Singapore, reflecting the shift in the centre of gravity in the world – the UK is only 4 per cent of his market.

“I knew that to be successful in Asia we had to be partly Asian,” he says. “It sounds sort of a racist thing to say, but we had to understand those markets. They are so often the markets that want the new things first. Their requirements are different and they have a different attitude.” Is there a naivety in Britain about its place in the world? “Yes, I think so. It’s odd, because Britain was a very international nation and seems often to be less so now.”

The centre of gravity for his market had already moved to Asia. But the optics of moving the HQ, after arguing for Brexit on the opportunities it might present to manufacturing, were lousy.

“I tried manufacturing [in the UK],” he says. “I built this factory, I spent hundreds of millions on kit for it. I wanted to make it work. I tried it for seven or eight years and gave it all I had. But our profits were going down, not because of labour costs, because those are the same [in Asia] – in Singapore, they’re much higher – but because of management and bringing all these components in from all over the world. Going abroad and making everything in one place reduced that overhead.

“You’re going to countries where people want to make things and suppliers want to grow and love manufacturing. We don’t have that here. It’s sad. I always blame people like Charles Dickens. Entrepreneurs

[in Dickens] weren’t middle class, they were lower-middle class. The middle class and aristocracy never aspired to manufacturing. At school, I was told that if you fail your exams you end up in a factory. Why is banking OK and manufacturing not?”

As to the current political situation in Britain, he misses the previous prime minister. “I’m disappointed we’re not going for growth,” he says. “I’ve made that plain. I was hopeful [with Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng]. I thought they were doing the right thing – I’m the only one who did.

“Kwarteng wasn’t raising taxes. He was going for growth, which I think is the right thing. It allows us to pay for things and generates wealth. Wealth generation and growth became dirty words. I’ve always believed that inflation isn’t quite the enemy everyone thinks it is. If you’ve got growth, a bit of inflation doesn’t matter. If you get inflation down and kill growth, I think you’re in trouble.”

Whenever British politicians describe the kinds of businesses they want Britain to produce, they might as well be describing Dyson. He ought to be as venerated as Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Instead, he is suing tabloid writers for libel. “The British are quite keen on criticising successful, ‘tall-poppy’ people,” he says. “So are the

Americans, but in America there is huge enthusiasm for wealth creators. There is less enthusiasm here.”

While Dyson the company blows on towards robots and batteries and ever more sophisticated vacuum cleaners, the boss admits to starting to feel his age. He is a grandfather now,

“I’ve got a bad knee so I’m not allowed to run anymore,” he says. “I’ve taken up cycling instead – but I miss running hugely. That’s the trouble with getting old. You imagine you can do things – but you can’t.”

The plan is that his son, Jake, a lighting designer, will one day take the reins. Another son, Sam, is in the music business, while his daughter Emily is the successful founder of Couverture & The Garbstore, in Notting Hill.

Dyson still believes in the motherland, even if it isn’t sufficiently appreciative of his efforts. “I’m optimistic, because we still have good universities and very fine people,” he says. “And people aren’t afraid to differ from everyone else. I like doing the wrong thing. If you do the wrong thing deliberately, you’re thinking in a different field. It doesn’t always work, but it sometimes does.”

Race Against Dementia is one of four charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal. The others are Go Beyond, the RAF Benevolent Fund and Marie Curie. To make a donation, please visit telegraph. co.uk/2023appeal or call 0151 284 1927

‘I like looking at things “the wrong way” and solving problems that others ignore’

‘In other countries people want to make things. We don’t have that here in Britain’