Living cost tsar says sorry to Johnson for critical tweets
In his first interview since the social media storm, the businessman refuses to quit.
David Buttress was in London for his first day as Boris Johnson’s cost of living tsar on Tuesday when his telephone started lighting up. The press, it soon became apparent, had been digging through his past tweets.
“Boris has to go, he just has to,” read one message sent into ether at the height of the partygate scandal back in January. “You can’t survive judgment like this.”
Another suggested the Prime Minister lacked “intelligence or integrity”. A third called him “a dead man walking politically”; a fourth “a lame duck PM”.
There were jibes about economic policy (“fast and loose”), cabinet colleagues (Jacob Rees-mogg showed “arrogance and ignorance”) and voting Tory (“a form of self-harm”).
As a businessman with no prior links to Westminster – his success came from co-founding Just Eat, the multibillion-pound online takeaway service – the political musings had never made news.
But now, the old utterances about his new boss to 8,000 Twitter followers were generating a slew of unhelpful headlines, with commentators questioning how long he would stay in the job.
“My phone’s always pretty busy. It did get a bit busier than normal,” the 46-year-old Welshman chuckles about the moment the news bomb dropped as he meets The Daily Telegraph at his central London offices for his first newspaper interview in the role.
In the conversation that follows Buttress rejects any suggestion of resignation, reveals he personally apologised to Johnson and vows to deliver tangible change for those in need. He also maps out for the first time his plan to get business bosses to help cut costs for the public – including a new drive to get supermarkets providing meals for children during school holidays.
Given the headlines, though, the tweets are a natural starting point. He fronts up, neither walking away from his past views nor criticising the coverage they have prompted.
“I think one of the things you do when you decide to try and do something meaningful like this is you’re going to obviously be held to a high level of scrutiny,” Buttress says. “And having built public companies, that’s something that I think I should expect, right? It’s ok.”
He goes on: “I think you’ve got to be grown-up about these things.
“I didn’t know anybody. I’ve been working in business and industry for the last 20 years and a little bit of sport. So I didn’t know anybody in politics and certainly didn’t know, obviously, anyone personally.
“So I think there’s a very innocent element to most people on social media where you just in a flippant moment say things.
“You don’t know people. It doesn’t mean that you actually believe it or even remember it. Because genuinely I didn’t remember it.”
No memory of sending the tweets? Really? “Absolutely not, absolutely not. Otherwise obviously you probably wouldn’t have left it, right?” Which as an argument – if I’d remembered the tweets I would have deleted them – does have a certain ring of truth. Buttress is clearly mortified by the embarrassment he may have caused. Throughout the interview he references the influence of his mother Jennifer, who bought up David and his two brothers in South Wales.
He apologised to the Prime Minister – via text message, according to a Downing Street source – and mentions his mother’s life lessons to explain why. “I think it’s really important to me, the way I was brought up, that if you say something about another person you don’t know, I think you should apologise. So yeah, you’re right I apologised and I think it’s right that I did. But in private,” he says.
So why did he not consider resigning over the furore? “Because nothing changed fundamentally,” he shoots back. “I want to get stuck in and deliver some practical things into real people’s lives and get my old friends in business and industry to come to the party and help. So no, never crossed my mind.” There is a line of argument – one the Prime Minister’s supporters would no doubt echo – that the potential strength of Buttress’s appointment comes exactly from the fact he is a Westminster outsider rather than a dyed in the wool Conservative. Both his business triumphs and personal backstory give weight to the idea. He plotted a path from the council estates of Cwmbran to the CEO seat of a British-made “unicorn,” one of those rare companies that hits a billion-pound valuation.
“I grew up in South Wales,” he says, looking back. “I had a very inspiring mum. I grew up in a single-parent family with three brothers. It was of course financially challenged. My mum had a part-time job in Sainsbury’s, I grew up in a council estate. You know, in the 1980s and early 1990s in South Wales I can tell you there were definitely moments when things were tight. Probably most weeks. But you don’t miss what you don’t have, right? So as a child, I never felt any sense of not having stuff.
“It just meant I would have to work maybe harder to get it. So at 11 I got a paper round so I could help my mom out by buying my own football boots, things like that. I could tip some money in to help out with shopping.
“I think that gave me, actually, a really great gift, which is a real sense of taking responsibility and getting stuff done to help.”
So what of the job at hand? Recent political history is littered with so-called “tsars” who have come and gone from Whitehall without leaving much of a mark. Can Buttress buck the trend? It is early days in the role, but Buttress says he wants to focus on three “big buckets” of expenditure – grocery and costs, utility bills and leisure spending. He gives a specific: “I was in a meeting the other day with, for example, the Co-op. They’re doing some amazing work around their stores about helping poor families with food in the areas they operate and helping them through the school holidays as part of an education programme.
“So there’s lots of good stuff happening there. That’s a great programme. If I can help them to share that, share best practice with some of the other big grocers, and we scale that up and we all get behind some initiatives like that.”
The scheme referenced appears to be part of Co-op’s Local Community Fund. It sees 2p in every pound spent by Co-op members donated to the fund, in turn supporting scores of worthy ventures. How the money is spent is decided on a local level, with some of the money apparently going to providing healthy, nutritious meals to children during the school holidays – not covered by the Government’s own free school meals programme.
More than 2,300 projects in schools have benefited, according to a Co-op spokesman, with £6.6m in funding.
If scaled up, it could make a real difference in people’s lives, Buttress believes. He adds: “Let’s put ourselves under pressure to get in and deliver really quickly because this needs to happen fast.”
‘His strength is that he is a Westminster outsider rather than a dyed in the wool Tory’