Dirty Politics, Dirty Times E-Book

Michael Ashcroft

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Seitenzahl: 678

Beschreibung

This is a newly revised and updated paperback edition of the former Conservative Party Treasurer's personal account of his battle over unsubstantiated claims concerning his business affairs which culminated in a libel action against "The Times" newspaper. The book reveals the dirty tricks that were used to destabilise the Conservative Party, including the newspaper's alleged bribery of US government officials, and the abuse of parliamentary privileges by New Labour MPs. This is Lord Ashcroft's compelling account of the attacks on his reputation by New Labour spin-doctors out to slander the Conservative Party and journalists seeking to create a story. This new edition also sheds new light on Michael Ashcroft's private life; his childhood and love of Belize, his business career and his many and varied interests.

Leseprobe

Michael Ashcroft

Dirty politics Dirty times

My fight with Wapping and New Labour

To Eric Ashcroft: my father, my inspiration

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

1 Trading in Doughnuts

2 Down to Business

3 The Donor

4 Rough Waters

5 Raising the Stakes

6 Fighting Back

7 The Need to Settle

8 Targeted Again

9 The Money Man

10 Taking on New Labour

11 The Aftermath

Epilogue

Illustrations

Index

About the Author

Copyright

Preface

THIS IS not a conventional autobiography. That daunting task will have to wait until the other side of my bus pass. Instead, this is an account of an eye-opening and turbulent period in my life during which I discovered the shadowy side of British politics and the unacceptable face of national newspaper journalism – not as a spectator, but as the prime target.

As the survivor of hundreds of gruelling commercial deals and some of the most vigorously contested boardroom battles of my generation, I thought I had seen it all. Nothing I had witnessed in my business career, however, prepared me for the dirty tricks and the criminality that I encountered from the summer of 1999 onwards. By that point, a year into my tenure as Treasurer of the Conservative Party, most people outside the worlds of business and politics would not have heard of me. In the City, I had acquired a reputation – one that I was not altogether unhappy with – of being a successful, if tough and unconventional, businessman. At Westminster, I was a relative new boy charged by William Hague with turning around the fortunes of the Tory Party’s fragile finances.

Unwittingly and reluctantly, I was propelled into the public spotlight as I became the target of concerted attacks aimed at removing me as Treasurer. As the momentum of the assaults on my position increased, I began to see that their underlying purpose was a more sinister, indeed undemocratic, one: to damage the finances and credibility of Her Majesty’s Opposition and to destabilise William Hague’s position as leader of the Conservative Party. Those trying to undermine my position as Treasurer – and in the process harming my business interests on both sides of the Atlantic – were The Times, one of Britain’s oldest and most influential newspapers, and the Labour Government, led by Tony Blair and his cronies. Both were formidable opponents. Among my adversaries, I soon discovered, were some who thought little of using deception, falsehoods and law-breaking in trying to harm my reputation, seemingly indifferent to the impact on my ability to work as an entrepreneur. The old saying about ‘not seeing a belt without hitting below it’ was tailor-made for them.

Once the campaigns against me had begun in earnest, I had to make a choice: to duck for cover, step down quietly, desert my friends and allow the bully-boys to claim another scalp – or to defend myself, my family, the values I uphold and the political party I have supported all my adult life. In short, I had to decide whether to surrender or to fight and, as has been my instinct over the years, I chose the latter, confident that I held the moral high ground.

When I decided to stand up to The Times and New Labour, I had no idea how long, tortuous and costly such a confrontation would be – or how low some of my enemies would stoop to try to destroy me. Indeed, it is only recently that I have become fully aware of the extent of the machinations against me and the indefensible tactics that were employed in the attempts to defeat me. In order to survive, I had to challenge The Times and New Labour on many fronts: courtrooms on two continents, Parliament, the media, government offices and departments of state. I had to defend myself in the two countries that I love: Britain, where I was born and largely raised, and Belize, where I spent three years of my childhood and which, three decades later, became my home for a second time.

Eventually I achieved what I set out to do – I won my battles, and my enemies were embarrassed and punished. I forced The Times to publish a prominent front-page statement clearing my name. The illegal sources the newspaper had been happy to use in order to blacken my name were exposed. I successfully sued the Government, forcing it to give me an unequivocal apology for its attempts to damage my reputation. Furthermore, I gained access to thousands of documents containing ‘confidential’ information held on me, and I forced the Government to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds in costs that I had spent fighting an unnecessary essary legal battle against those who should have known better. The Times and New Labour, in contrast, failed to destroy either of their targets: I emerged with a knighthood, a peerage and my good name intact, while the Conservative Party, aided by a firmer financial base, regrouped, reunited and, I trust, will soon rediscover its winning ways.

This book tells the story of my battle against what had once been great and respected institutions. In the years since 1999, those who acted illegally or overstepped the mark have been brought to justice. For instance, one overseas government official who broke the law in an attempt to discredit me has been jailed. The process of challenging my rivals has, at times, been wearing and frustrating, but overall it has been fascinating and instructive. My search for openness and the truth has encouraged others to turn on their unscrupulous paymasters. I am grateful for the co-operation that I have received from people on the fringes of the campaign. They had been uneasy about some of the disgraceful behaviour that went on and therefore decided to share some of their inside knowledge of events with me.

I have now been a working peer for nine years and it has taken me all that time to piece together the chronology of the various actions against me and to establish who was responsible for them. The gathering of such information has not come easily nor cheaply. Fortunately, I have had the means that might not be available to others and the successful results of my endeavours have made the trials and tribulations along the way worthwhile. I believe, too, that my discoveries have raised important questions about the willingness of some of those people in government and in the media to exploit and abuse – and thereby tarnish – the positions they hold.

For years, my detractors have accused me of being ‘secretive’, ‘mysterious’ and worse in my personal and business lives when I thought I had little to tell and no reason for telling it. In order to recount my story now, I recognise that I need to reveal a little of my life. There is, however, an important caveat: although I am willing to share intimate details of my life, my wife Susi and my first wife Wendy and our three children have always fiercely guarded their privacy. I have to respect this and I will not betray the trust and the support that they have provided for so long, and for which I am extremely grateful. For that reason, my love for them and my appreciation for the happiness they have brought me will not find expression in these pages.

Just as I feel I need to reveal a little of my early life, it would be odd to treat my battles against The Times and New Labour in isolation. I will explain how they coincided with my work as Treasurer of the Conservative Party and how they unavoidably became entangled with my business life. I will outline, too, how I learned from the mistakes of the 2001 election campaign and how I did my bit to try to ensure they were not repeated four years later – during the 2005 campaign. Finally, with David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party, there is a new mood of confidence and professionalism among Tories that I hope will enable us to be returned to power at the next general election.

Knowing where to start my story is the hard bit. I will begin with a brief introduction to Michael Anthony Ashcroft, born 4 March 1946.

1 Trading in Doughnuts

IT WAS in the Queen’s Coronation year that I first set eyes on the country that was later to become my adopted homeland. My father, an administrator in the Colonial Service, had been posted to what was then British Honduras – now Belize – following a spell in the African outpost of Nyasaland (now Malawi). The Ashcroft family arrived in late 1953 just as postage stamps from this remote part of the Commonwealth were beginning to display the image of Queen Elizabeth II. When my parents first learned that they were going to British Honduras, they had to study an atlas to discover its precise location in Central America. The country borders Mexico to the north and Guatemala to the west and south, while to the east is the Caribbean Sea. It has a sub-tropical climate, with rainy and dry seasons. Its forests are rich in wildlife – big cats and crocodiles, baboons and monkeys, parrots and hummingbirds.

To a seven-year-old boy, the scenery of this small but beautiful land held less of a fascination than those exotic creatures lurking in the jungle or swimming in the Caribbean. This was just about as different from my birthplace of Chichester, West Sussex, as anything I could have imagined. These were carefree days and I recall them fondly. I attended St Catherine’s Academy, a mixed day school. I had an abundance of new friends, the children of local Belizeans and of the expatriate community. Weekends were spent on boat trips to the Northern Cayes, exploring the rainforest close to Belize’s disputed border with Guatemala or snorkelling on the 185 miles of coral reef that runs from north to south some six miles off the mainland. This is shorter than the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, but nonetheless qualifies as the longest living reef in the world.

Although the Union Jack fluttered proudly in Belize City, where we lived, it would have been hard to find a more ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse nation. Some pure Amerindian blood remained in the shape of a handful of descendants of the Mayas, whose great civilisation occupied much of Central America for thousands of years. However, this had been seasoned with European – mostly Spanish – genes. Then there were the Creoles, descended from the early British settlers and the African slaves who had been brought from Jamaica. There were also the Lebanese, the Chinese and the North Americans, not forgetting the immigrants from the Indian sub-continent.

Despite the diversity of facial types, skin colours and surnames, the country was largely united by the fact that most of us spoke English and the Queen was, as she remains to this day, our head of state. Much of my personality was formed in these early years, making me cosmopolitan, proud of my essentially British roots and possessed of a passion for Belize that has never faltered.

Today I can return to Britain just over eleven hours after taking off from Belize airport, but my first visit there with my family involved a journey by sea and air that lasted more than a month. My father Frederic, who was always known by the abbreviation of Eric, my mother Lavinia, who preferred to be called Rene because she disliked her Christian name, my sister Patricia, then aged two, and myself had set off from Liverpool in a Fyffes banana boat. This was the traditional way that colonial officers journeyed to their new posts, and we stopped off at Trinidad, Barbados and, finally, the Jamaican capital of Kingston. Once in Kingston, we found there was just one flight a week on British West Indies Airways from Kingston to Belize City via the Cayman Islands. We discovered that the flight had left the day before and so we had a six-day wait for the next one. We spent that time sightseeing, including a visit to the old English pirates’ base at Port Royal.

The following week we arrived in British Honduras in the early evening just as it was getting dark. We were met by an official from the local outpost of the Colonial Office, where my father was about to become the principal auditor. Fifteen minutes later, we arrived by car in Belize City. It was my first sight of the city that was to become my home for the next three years. It was a strange mix of colonial-style houses and shanty suburbs. Our initial home was a first-floor apartment in a large house on the seafront at Marine Parade that was later to become the Mexican Embassy. A couple of months later, we moved into a four-bedroom, two-storey house built on wooden stilts to protect it from hurricane floodwaters. It was situated opposite the American Embassy and was little more than a hundred yards from both my school and the seafront.

British Honduras in the mid-1950s had a population of around 70,000 in a country the size of Wales. It was not for the squeamish: we were liable to find snakes among the washing and lizards above our heads as we slept. It was a country of real character and rich culture which deservedly gained its independence on 21 September 1981. On that date, every town and village in the country held a midnight ceremony at which the new flag of Belize was raised to the strains of the new national anthem.

I HAD been born in digs in Chichester, where my father was stationed, in the year after the end of the Second World War. To be precise, weighing in at a healthy 7lb 7oz, I had been born in my parents’ bedroom as my father rushed to summon medical help. When he returned home with a doctor and nurse, my mother had delivered their first child unaided.

My parents had met two years earlier in 1944 at the Winter Gardens Ballroom in Blackpool, the town where my father was convalescing after being wounded on D-Day and where my mother was working as a Red Cross nurse. Both my parents were sturdy Lancastrians and proud of their roots: my father from Bolton, my mother from Burnley. Just weeks after asking my mother for their first dance, my father was given a clean bill of health and was sent back to his regiment.

After my father left the Army, we went to live in Burnley with my mother’s uncle and aunt in a two-up, two-down terraced house with an outside lavatory, which could have come straight out of an early episode of Coronation Street. My mother’s uncle had fought at the Battle of the Somme in the First World War and was only too willing to help a demobbed soldier who was short of money. The shared house was a temporary base for us while my father looked for work. To begin with, he hoped to teach but, with few openings available in education, he decided to explore the possibilities abroad. An opportunity arose when he spotted a newspaper advertisement for overseas Colonial Office staff – in the post-war era, the Colonial Office had dropped its usual requirement of a university education. So my father, who had left school at fourteen, applied and was soon offered a posting to Nyasaland, where we lived from 1947 to 1953. Before leaving for Nyasaland, a final piece of housekeeping was completed when my parents were at last able to marry thanks to the formal ending of my mother’s first, loveless marriage.

My parents were very different, yet they complemented each other. My father was regarded by those who knew him as one of life’s quiet gentlemen. He was a man of immense integrity who was always generous with his time and advice if a friend was in need. My mother, though affectionate and committed to family life, had a more fiery side. On one occasion, when we were all sitting at the dining table at our home in Belize, my mother lost her temper with my father and threw the dregs of her cup of tea over him. As the sodden tea leaves began to trickle down my father’s white shirt, he did not move a muscle, but after a pause he told my mother calmly: ‘I always wanted a tea-shirt.’ It was typical of her occasional hot-headedness and his placidity. As a couple, they were devoted to each other: both were only children who provided the other with a stability that had been lacking during their own childhoods. My father’s father had died when he was thirteen, while my mother had been part of a role reversal that was unusual by any standards. Her grandmother acted as her stand-in mother and looked after her, while her actual mother, who was referred to as her aunt, lived elsewhere. As a child, my mother believed that her grandmother was her natural mother and it was not until she was a teenager that she learned the truth.

My childhood experience encouraged in me a trait that I have never shaken off: an insatiable wanderlust. I have never stopped travelling and I hope I never will. Even when we left Belize in 1956, there was to be one last family adventure in America. We flew to Guatemala City, where we spent some time before flying on to Mexico City and then travelling by train to New York, via Dallas, Texas, to visit some relatives who had moved to the US during the Second World War. From New York, we took the Queen Elizabeth to Southampton and caught the boat train to Victoria station in central London. As the Ashcrofts left Belize, it was impossible to imagine the large part it would play in my later life.

My father’s three years in Belize City were followed by a new posting to Eastern Nigeria (later to become Biafra), where he, my mother and my sister Patricia spent five years. Although I was only ten when my father received this posting, my parents decided that, owing to the poor standard of schools in Eastern Nigeria, I should go to boarding school in Britain. So, as the rest of the Ashcroft family set off for Africa, I got down to the one business that always defeated me: school work.

MY EARLY days as a boarder were neither happy nor easy. I had been to school only in the sub-tropics, I had an unusual accent from my years of living in the Caribbean – a difference that was seized upon mercilessly by my classmates – and I had no affinity, or feel, for Britain. Moreover, I felt lonely and miserable: my father, mother and sister had vanished out of my life and it would be nearly ten months before I saw them again.

My parents had decided that I should go to school in Norwich, where my maternal grandparents, who lived nearby, could keep a general eye on me. The farewell – on the London-bound platform at Diss railway station – was painful. My mother was in floods of tears, bordering on hysterics. I had thought about the goodbye in advance and had resolved not to cry. Although I did not shed any tears, it was difficult to keep a false smile on my face. My mother later described her feelings of guilt at leaving me. ‘I don’t think I ever fully recovered from the pain of that parting,’ she wrote. After her own unusual childhood, she had vowed that her own children would never feel abandoned and unloved. Yet she had faced a dilemma and later explained: ‘I would find it heartbreaking to be parted from the son I adored, and yet it was unthinkable that I should stand in the way of Eric’s career.’ I returned from Diss station to my grandparents’ home feeling thoroughly downhearted and confused.

I suffered because there was no fixed point in my life. I had difficulty adapting to the routine and discipline of school, and the tears that I had held back at the family farewell flowed late at night in my boarding house. The hardest part was that I could not understand why I had been left behind: other children who were boarding could visualise what home was, but I had no notion of ‘home’ because I had never set eyes on the place where my family were now living. My parents were in Nigeria, a country where I had never been, and every other previous temporary home was history. I was in Norwich with a group of boys and teachers who were strangers to me. I did not receive any phone calls from my parents but they did write regularly, usually every week. I, too, wrote regularly to them, although this was sometimes more out of duty than desire as the school insisted that once a week all boarders sent a letter to their parents. Virtually every letter I dispatched to my parents informed them that I was saving to buy something – perhaps a record, a book or a bicycle – and it was always gently angled to suggest that they might like to contribute to this worthy cause.

I was aware that my situation was not unique and that many other children were routinely packed off to boarding school at an even younger age. But this did not make my situation less difficult or less emotionally demanding. Some of my fellow boarders probably adapted better than me, others not so well. With my parents both being only children, I had no uncles, aunts or cousins and so there was no big family unit to support me. I was very much on my own. My treats came three times a term when I went to visit my grandparents – my mother’s mother and her second husband – for day trips. They were kindly grandparents and I stayed with them during the Christmas and Easter holidays. I knew nothing at that time of the unusual delegation of parental responsibility involving my mother as a child. Then, at the start of the summer holiday, I travelled on my own to Nigeria.

For an eleven-year-old boy alone, the journey was daunting. I caught the train from Norwich to London where I was met by a well-meaning lady from the Corona Society, a wonderful group of current and former colonial officers’ wives. The woman’s role was to meet me at Liverpool Street station, give me a meal and bed for the night and make sure that I checked in on time for my flight the following morning. Under the watchful eye of airline staff, who were instructed to look out for this ‘unaccompanied minor’, I flew on a Boeing Stratocruiser, one of the last of the great piston-engine propeller passenger planes, to Rome, Tripoli and Kano in northern Nigeria. Finally a small passenger plane flew me to Enugu, the capital of Eastern Nigeria. The journey by road, rail and air took three, occasionally four days each way, but it was more than worth it: I was overjoyed to be reunited with my family and spent the summer months in the home that I had tried for the best part of a year to imagine – in reality an unspectacular apartment in a government-owned block of flats. With five years between us, my sister and I have never been particularly close, but we have always shared the same sense of humour and I was thrilled to be with her again. Patricia has always been more studious than me – she went on to become a teacher and to marry a teacher – while I always found it hard enough to participate in a lesson and certainly never had any desire to conduct one. My happy times with my parents and my sister as a reunited family were, however, small comfort when it came to saying goodbye again and embarking on the long return journey to Norwich.

Being ‘abandoned’ – as I saw it then – taught me resilience, independence and determination. I am sure I would be a different person today if I had not had such testing, if then unwished for, experiences. My drive to succeed had its roots in my schooldays. If I had not had these experiences, I would not later have had the overwhelming will to make a success of my life and it would have ended up differently. My schooldays undoubtedly made me self-sufficient. I had to form my own judgements and it stopped me from becoming a procrastinator. My decisions were my own because there was nobody else to take them for me. Yet, at the time, I felt resentment towards my parents. My mother later said that she noticed a change in my behaviour after I started attending boarding school. The boy she had previously described as ‘pleasant and cheerful, with an impish smile’ became more moody and difficult during the weeks that she saw me in the holidays. Because I did not want to leave my family for the return to school, my mood swings became especially pronounced as each summer holiday neared its end.

The first of two schools that I attended in Britain was King Edward VI Grammar School in Norwich. Usually referred to simply as Norwich School, it was an establishment for boys only, where only a fifth of the pupils were boarders. As a schoolboy, I was restless, almost hyperactive. I was rowdy but my classroom misdemeanours were numerous rather than serious. As far as I know, I was never close to being suspended or expelled, but my disciplinary record was poor. I was constantly in detention, where I had to write repetitive lines promising that my behaviour would improve. I also received the odd caning. Furthermore I had my share of bad luck: one detention was imposed when a friend and I sneaked out of school without permission to watch Norwich City play a home match – only to be spotted by a teacher from the school who was in the crowd supporting his local team.

I could not concentrate properly and my mind constantly wandered. I could sit down for an entire forty-minute lesson and not absorb a single word. My mind was not lazy but it quickly turned to subjects of more interest. Although I had a vivid imagination, I lacked the learning skills to enable me to do well in exams. The only exams I passed were either easy or in subjects that were interesting enough for me to retain information without endless revision. I did well at mathematics because I did not have to try. More by good fortune than academic excellence, I passed an acceptable number of O levels – eight altogether – though with modest grades.

Some newspaper profiles of me have suggested that during my schooldays I was an unhappy ‘loner’, using the word to imply that I had a character defect. Certainly I could – and indeed still can – be happy in my own company. I have never needed people around me to be content. I can sit and work on my own and I can potter about on my own: activities that most people would prefer to share with others. Yet I also enjoy amusing and interesting company and sharing my time with those I love. At school, I did not lead a solitary existence. I had a small group of good friends and I represented the school at team sports. I was not the best in my year at any sport but I was good enough to play rugby for the school – at second row and wing forward (as flankers were then known) – and I also represented the school swimming team at freestyle. I hated playing cricket, yet today I have a lot of fun watching Test matches.

I did not have traditional schoolboy heroes such as a sporting colossus or a Hollywood film star. My heroes were people who had served their country at a time of crisis. They included Field Marshal Montgomery and Sir Winston Churchill for what they did for Britain during the Second World War. I looked up to both of them for their formidable achievements during a hazardous period of our country’s history.

It was at Norwich School that I embarked on my first profit-making exercise. There was a shop opposite the school that sold doughnuts for 3d each, but I discovered another shop some 400 yards further towards the town centre that sold identical doughnuts for a ha’penny less. There were regular whip-rounds among the boys for doughnuts and, after such an event, I was always glad to go on my own to buy them. I had a reputation among my friends at the age of twelve as a bit of a softy – always the person who was willing to go off alone to get the doughnuts. I cheerfully let them remain under this misapprehension because it earned me extra money, even at just a ha’penny profit per doughnut. My early entrepreneurial skills would have yielded an ample enough cash profit over the years had it not been for my schoolboy greed. My profits were never banked: every five doughnuts bought for friends were immediately converted into a free one for me. I considered this to be an acceptable return for providing a rather useful service, one that was prophetically in line with my later business ethics. Although I was not being 100 per cent open about my activities, I was not doing my friends down because in their hunger they were very happy to pay the going rate of 3d per doughnut from the shop next to the school. Yet there were probably people then, as now, who – if they had discovered exactly what I was doing – might have found my practice a little sharp. I looked upon it simply as working to find an edge, the sort of advantage that I would search for time and again in my adult working life.

My early enterprising streak did not go unnoticed. I can remember at least one occasion when my housemaster remarked on my initiative. When all the boys were asked to collect books for charity, I was the only pupil willing to knock on the door of the Bishop of Norwich. I engaged him in conversation and, possibly detecting my unusual accent, the Bishop asked me where my home was. When I replied, ‘I used to live in British Honduras,’ he said he knew the country and was interested in it – and so I left his palace armed with an impressive collection of old books.

During my final year at Norwich School, I became a day boy. My mother’s health had deteriorated in Nigeria and my father had resigned from the Colonial Office so that they could return to England – and we were together again as a family after five years apart. My parents bought a modest three-bedroom bungalow in the village of Cringleford three miles outside Norwich. We later moved to Maidenhead, Berkshire, where my father commuted every day to a new job as bursar of Ashford School for Girls in Middlesex. I therefore switched schools for my A levels and attended the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. However, the change of schools and a more settled home life did not improve my concentration or my academic results.

I never had a driving ambition to embark on a particular career but a parable a teacher told me when I was about sixteen made a lasting impression on me. ‘If someone goes into your back garden and comes back ten minutes later with half a crown they have found and then another person goes into your back garden and comes back in the same amount of time with half a crown, it can look on the surface as if the two situations are identical,’ said the teacher. ‘But, in fact, the situations in which the half-crowns were found might be very different. The first man might have been daydreaming in the garden when the sun just happened to glint on the half-crown and he picked it up; while the second man might have been scouring and scanning the entire garden when he found the money. If this is the case, the first man is plain lucky and the second man is also lucky but he has created his own luck by searching even though he did not know what he was looking for.’ I took that idea very much to heart. Even if you do not know which direction you are going in, provided you keep searching and probing for the right opportunity – and when it arises grab it – you will make your own luck in life.

By the time I was a student, I knew I would never be the sort of person who sat back and bemoaned his luck or his lot. I was a man on a mission, even though I did not know what the mission was or in which direction it would take me. I was confident that, if I kept searching, something would turn up. As a teenager, I wanted to be rich but I did not know how to go about it. I would dream of discovering a remarkable product that I could patent and which would make my fortune. Yet, in reality, I knew that finding such a money-spinning product was highly unlikely, so I suppose my ambition in life at that point was never stronger than saying to myself: ‘I know an opportunity will come. I do not know what it will be or how it will present itself, but I do know that I will make damn sure that I snatch the opportunity when it comes along.’ I had also realised that opportunity always looks bigger going away than coming towards you.

I have few enduring memories of my time at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, and the word ‘dismal’ most accurately sums up my academic achievements. As with my previous school, and however good the teaching, I absorbed little that I was taught. People who know me now sometimes find it hard to imagine that at school I was not fiercely competitive both in the classroom and on the playing field, but competition to me means either to be the best or to be truly outstanding at something. I was never good academically, which I learned to accept, and I was never the best at any sport, which I also accepted. There was, at that point in my life, nothing at which I felt able to excel – and that competitive drive did not come until I was in my late twenties.

My A levels were, at best, disappointing. I passed mathematics but failed physics and chemistry. My results did not surprise me, but they were not what I – or my parents – had wanted. I had been optimistic that I would scrape a pass in physics because it involved quite a lot of mathematics, but the chemistry had required too much concentrated work and simply defeated me. My A levels ended my hopes of studying for a degree in mathematics and psychology at Reading University, a course for which I had been provisionally accepted.

This setback left me with a straightforward choice: to get a job or to enrol on a less prestigious course of higher education. I chose the latter and in September 1965 embarked on a Higher National Diploma (HND) in business studies at Mid-Essex Technical College in Chelmsford. Even though I had messed up my A levels, I still felt confident that I had a creative brain, but it needed to be engaged. If it was not engaged, it was useless. I never succeeded, for instance, in mastering languages because of the work involved in learning them. I did, however, find my business course fascinating and as such enjoyed my studies and learned a great deal. I found accountancy, marketing and the other parts of the course utterly engrossing. It was as if I had discovered a new jigsaw puzzle and I was curious to put all the pieces together as quickly as possible.

It was a time, too, when I discovered new vices: pretty girls, beer and a short-lived twenty-a-day smoking habit. I was a regular at the Railway Tavern, a popular but less than exclusive pub close to the college that always looked as if it desperately needed a lick of paint. However, the student drugs scene never interested me – indeed even as a student I was vehemently and unfashionably anti-drugs. I felt uncomfortable if I was at a party and fellow students openly smoked a joint or if the smell of cannabis pervaded the air. My contemporaries have remembered other traits in my character which were not typical of the average student. I was actively Conservative with a capital C and pro-police at a time in life when it was far trendier to be left-wing and anti-authority. I have no doubt that I was generally more interested in money than the typical student. Early on, I had an ambition to earn – and save – enough money to buy a second-hand Mini, and I achieved this aim within a matter of months. I had a reputation for being good for my word on money matters. If I had to pay a bill, it was always paid before or on the date it was due. Similarly, if I wrote a cheque, it could always be banked immediately and, unlike the cheques of some of my friends, there was no danger it would bounce.

Looking back, I was already more abrasive and larger than life than most of my contemporaries. I suspect my views and values have changed far less over the years than those of my student contemporaries. Even by the time I was in my late teens, I had formed strong, consistent and – at that time – unfashionable beliefs that I still hold to this day. Although I was interested in politics, I avoided the rent-a-mob protesters and the hopelessly earnest. I did, however, play an active role in the college rag scene because practical jokes and fun parties appealed to me. Although I would admit that raising money for good causes was not the prime motive of my involvement in rag week, this was my first flirtation with charity work – another activity that would return to play an important part in my life.

As with my school days, I showed flashes of entrepreneurial flair as a student. I discovered that only one cinema in central London had the rights to screen the live world-title boxing bouts of Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay (this was of course long before satellite television and ‘pay per view’). Even more interestingly, I discovered that demand for seats outstripped the supply and that therefore the tickets fetched considerably more on the black market than their retail price. Always on the look-out for ways to supplement my student grant, I set myself up as a small-time ticket tout. But, as so often happens in business, there were occasional hiccups. On one occasion, a second cinema in London was allowed to open for an Ali fight and the price of seats at the Leicester Square cinema I had bought tumbled as a result. As with the doughnut purchasing at school, there was no vast profit margin from my experiences as a ticket tout. I simply made enough on the sale of a dozen or so tickets to watch the big fight for free. I was a great Ali fan and I loved watching him box. I was not alone, and on one memorable night I found myself sitting behind the comedy duo of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. My experiences with the second London cinema opening at short notice had taught me a lesson too: there is no such thing as a certain profit from a business proposition and even the best-laid plans can go awry.

Around the same time and with the help of two college friends, I founded my first organised business, Odd Jobs Unlimited, which, though far too small to be a genuine company, exhibited the attitude and enterprise I thought was lacking in most of my contemporaries. We advertised our wares in a local newspaper with the slogan ‘You name it, we’ll do it’. Those seeking to employ us had to write to the local weekly paper where we picked up letters once a week. Whatever the weather, we gardened, painted or did whatever task our clients required. One of my roles was to work on a local estate cutting the seemingly endless expanse of lawns using a sit-on mower. We were game for anything. Odd Jobs Unlimited achieved its modest aim – enabling us to earn enough for a few pints at the Railway Tavern while we pursued our studies.

During the summer holidays, and when I was living back at my parents’ home in Maidenhead, I got a job at El Toucan, a family-run café in the town, making and serving frothy coffees and other hot drinks to a mixture of weary shoppers and local traders. I always tried to be efficient and friendly to the customers because a coffee cost 10d and I knew that, with luck, they would leave me a shilling – which included a generous 2d tip. I also worked as an attendant at our local outdoor swimming pool in Chelmsford. I had the obligatory attendant’s whistle around my neck and used to blow it to stop children from running or fighting in and around the pool. The job had one notable perk: it was useful for admiring and, occasionally, dating the local talent. I also managed a pop group called Trident whom I naturally hoped would become the equivalent in fame and wealth to the Beatles. Trident was a four-man rhythm ’n’ blues band and my managerial role involved driving the group around in a battered green Transit-style van to their often less than packed gigs. Fame always eluded us, and the band eventually broke up, leaving its members and its manager as impoverished as the day it had been formed.

As a student, I also learned to play bridge, teaching myself the rules and the necessary skills by reading books. I loved the game and quickly reached the point where I was just below county standard. While on holiday and living at my parents’ house, I used to play with the ladies – mostly well advanced in years – of Maidenhead Conservative Club. They were always pleased to see a young man take up the game and I was equally delighted that my standard of play was slightly better than theirs. We would play for small amounts of money – 6d a hundred points – and I finished up with a small profit by the end of the holidays.

At this time in my life, I developed a little party trick. I discovered that I could memorise a deck of cards and then, as I turned over the fifty-two cards one by one, predict which one would come next. I occasionally made the odd mistake but not often, and I enjoyed the admiring look on people’s faces when they saw what I could do. I started experimenting with similar games to test whether I had a photographic memory in other areas. I found that if someone showed me twenty different objects in succession, I could recite them all in any sequence that was demanded; forwards or backwards starting with any of the objects that I was given. It was my card-counting abilities that were to make me a half-decent bridge player and it was a near-photographic memory that would later give me another edge in my business dealings. Over the years, I have had the ability to retain the smallest details in my head and to think laterally – though I have to concede that age has made these skills less pronounced than they were in my youth.

BY THE time my student days ended, I had long come to accept that I was never going to be an academic genius. However, I had learned to live with my shortcomings – notably my lack of concentration – and found ways of obscuring them.

Recognising that I had weaknesses was one thing, but identifying exactly what they were was more difficult. It was not until I had reached the age of forty-five that the penny dropped. My younger son, Andrew, who was twelve years old at the time, was having problems at school. On the face of it, he seemed to be re-running his father’s experience. However, in contrast to the treatment prescribed in my youth, when I was simply told to pull my socks up, Andrew was sent to an educational psychologist who gave him certain tests, including one that I can remember vividly. Andrew was doing some writing when the psychologist went up to the Venetian blinds on the window and ran his hand down them. Andrew looked up because he had been distracted by the sound and, immediately afterwards, had lost his concentration so totally that he could not return to his writing. The psychologist diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), a complaint of which I was entirely ignorant.

So I bought the books in order to read a little on the subject and quickly found that I could not put them down. It was like a great awakening. In reading about the condition as it applied to Andrew, I discovered, for the first time in my life, that I was reading about myself. In every example cited, I saw elements of myself, and every device used to cover the problem was a device to which I had resorted. The scales fell from my eyes and I felt much better for it. ADD is a neuro-development disorder which affects a sufferer’s ability to learn and interact with other people. Some of the common indicators are excess fidgeting, lack of concentration, clowning around, excessive talking, short attention span and engaging in high-risk activities. I recognised each of those characteristics in myself: had I ever bothered to fill in an entry for Who’s Who, I could have listed them under ‘Recreations’.

My experience of the problems caused by ADD gave me enormous empathy with Andrew. I began to understand how people with ADD come to be better in certain professions than in others. A disproportionate number of explorers over the years are now believed to have had ADD, their restlessness prompting their ventures into the unknown. Indeed, perhaps my own wanderlust has the same origin. Nowadays, those with ADD often become salesmen relying on the gift of the gab, while more recently I read in an American business survey that the number-one characteristic of successful businessmen is oral persuasiveness. Through Andrew’s problems, everything began to fall into place and I realised for the first time that during my schooldays I had suffered from ADD but it had not been understood or treated. Fortunately, with Andrew there was time to help him and everything from his school grades to his attendance improved dramatically.

At my age, it was too late to treat my ADD. To this day, I find it hard to write lengthy business reports. One of the important lessons I learned long ago is not to be afraid of employing others to do what you cannot do yourself. I have always surrounded myself with capable, trusted people upon whom I can rely. Even now, I can go into a lecture and if, after a few sentences, the speaker has lost me I go off into my own little world for the rest of the talk. By the end of it, I will not have heard or absorbed a single word the lecturer said. I take some comfort, at least, from the fact that the time is rarely wasted. I usually put it to good use pondering what I need to do the next day or how to tackle some troublesome issue.

IN THE same way that some academic studies bored me rigid, other subjects have instantly captured my imagination. Encouraged by films and books on the subject, I have always been fascinated by the concept of danger. This, in turn, led to an almost obsessive interest in some of the heroic figures of the Second World War, notably the Cockleshell Heroes, the name given to a small group of Royal Marines who mounted a daring and successful raid on German shipping in the French port of Bordeaux in 1942. I am intrigued by the way people, often apparently quiet and nondescript, come to terms with the possibility, even in rare cases the probability, that they will be killed or wounded in battle. What makes them different – or are we all capable of such bravery in certain circumstances? Why are the bravest so often the most modest? Is it upbringing, training, religion, patriotism, character or values such as honour and duty which makes people prepared to go to extraordinary lengths for their country and their comrades? The biggest inspiration for my interest in courage was undoubtedly my father.

Eric Ashcroft was a tough, independent man and I like to think that I have inherited those qualities. When his own father died at thirteen, he had to leave school the next year to become the family breadwinner. He had a variety of jobs, including working in the local cotton mill, until war broke out in 1939. He then became one of the first to enlist, joining the South Lancashire Regiment. He was selected for officer training, after which he returned to the regiment. He remained in Britain until the D-Day landings.

At dawn on 6 June 1944, my father found himself on a landing craft crashing through the waves of the English Channel, heading for Sword Beach as part of the British 3rd Infantry Division. I have often wondered what it must have been like for those young men, many of whom, my father among them, were seeing action for the first time. As they reached the beach, they encountered heavy enemy fire. My father’s commanding officer, a colonel, was one of the first casualties, shot dead at my father’s side by a sniper. My father, too, was struck by shrapnel. Despite wounds to his back and to one of his arms, he refused to be evacuated and carried on fighting until he was eventually ordered from the field of battle. The injuries proved serious enough to end his front-line service.

My father was a modest man but, on the few occasions when I could persuade him to talk about the events of that day, I realised just how brave he and the men he fought with had been. I recall him one day telling me in a quiet, matter-of-fact way that he and other officers had been briefed to expect 75 per cent casualties – fatalities and wounded – on the beach as they landed in Normandy. I have often wondered what it would have been like to have been in my father’s shoes that day and whether I, too, could have matched his bravery in my country’s hour of need.

My greatest military interest of all has been in the Victoria Cross. Some of the acts of bravery carried out by servicemen who have won VCs simply beggar belief. ‘For most conspicuous bravery or some daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice or extreme devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy’ – this is how VC citations usually begin, followed by a detailed account of the incident. The exploits of the handful of soldiers, sailors and airmen whose gallantry was such that they won the legendary medal have, for decades, fascinated countless young boys, and I was one of them. The VC is the premier honour for bravery which Britain and other Commonwealth countries can bestow upon their citizens, yet it respects neither rank nor birthright. Despite its great prestige, the medal is a modest Maltese cross, a little over an inch wide, which is cast not from gold or silver, but from base metal with no intrinsic value. The oldest winner of the VC was sixty-one, the youngest just fifteen.

When I was in my early twenties, I became aware that it was possible to buy VCs on the rare occasions that they came up for auction. I started ordering the relevant auction catalogues, but my resources were limited and the prices of the medals were prohibitive. Undeterred, I resolved one day, if my financial circumstances allowed it, to buy a VC. In the meantime, I continued to ask for the catalogues to be sent to me so that I could read more about why individual VCs had been awarded. The more I read about the medals, the more interested I became in them and the more determined I became to own one. It was not until I was forty that I went to an auction and successfully bid for a VC at Sotheby’s in July 1986, for one awarded to Leading Seaman Magennis, a diver who, while serving in Malaysia in 1945, fixed a mine to the underside of a Japanese warship which sank as a result of his heroics. Later, too, I satisfied my early schoolboy fascination and bought the medals earned by a serviceman who had won one of them on the Cockleshell Heroes’ raid.

The VCs have become my pride and joy. They are part of Britain’s history. Over the years, I have helped to collect more than 150 VCs. They are held by a trust which now holds well in excess of one in ten of all the VCs which have been awarded. Many of these might otherwise now have left the United Kingdom. Some people who know of my interest assume I am an expert in Britain’s military history since the introduction of the medal in 1856, though in fact I am not. My knowledge tends to be restricted to the battles and campaigns in which VCs were issued, leaving great gaps in my knowledge of British military history from the mid-nineteenth century until today.

Such rare medals are not cheap and the trust’s collection is now worth several million pounds. However, the trust has adhered to a strict rule: it does not ‘ambulance chase’ or go in search of medals that are not on the market. The only medals in the collection are ones which either the recipients or their families wanted to sell privately, through a dealer or at auction. One of the other sections of medals in the trust’s collection is for those won by the SAS, again for the reason that they are often associated with quite staggering acts of bravery. With each of the medals in the collection, there is a small, bound book detailing the exploits for which they were awarded. I do not believe there is another collection of VCs in the United Kingdom – and that includes the Imperial War Museum in London – that is as extensive or as interesting.

To my mind – and I concede that I am somewhat biased – my father was one of the many unsung war heroes of his generation. After he was demobbed – he left the Army with the rank of captain – he set his sights on new and distant goals. He enjoyed his time in the Colonial Office enormously but he gave up a promising career for the sake of my mother’s health. Back in England, life was tougher than he had imagined. If he had a character weakness – and this may sound strange to some people – it was that he was too willing to put my mother first. His love for her meant that he was always ready to sacrifice his own interests – most notably his own career.

My father retired at sixty and, after a long and happy retirement, died from leukaemia in 2002 at the age of eighty-four. His regiment sent down the pall-bearers for his funeral and the Last Post was played by a bugler in the church. My father’s war medals were on his coffin and I gave the address about his remarkable life. It was a deeply moving day.

Like many children who have lost a parent, I regret not spending more time in my father’s company. There were only a few months between the diagnosis of his leukaemia and his death, but they provided time enough for his family to say their farewells. A week or so before he died, my father and I sat together at his home in Goring and had a long, difficult conversation. We discussed how I should look after my mother after he had died. I made my peace with him, telling him that, although he had always been a good father, I had not always been the most thoughtful son.

I am immensely proud of my father and I like to think that he was also proud of me and my achievements. He never had any great goal or ambition for his only son, but he had seen me in my early twenties as a lost and restless soul who seemed directionless. He was not unsupportive, but I think he felt unable to help point me in the right direction. Instead, he watched from afar – but with genuine interest – as I went through my early career stutters and my later business successes. It must have been like watching someone you care for climb up a cliff, lose his grip, fall down, cling on by his fingertips and, finally, pull himself up again.

I miss my father and his distinctive sense of fun. I can still vividly recall that when I was a boy he attended a fancy-dress party in Belize and was wearing a white shirt covered with large and striking scorched-brown burn marks from an iron. He had a sign around his neck which simply read: ‘Press on regardless’. It was typical of my father – always doing something slightly differently but with a mischievous sense of humour about it too.

2 Down to Business

MY ACADEMIC studies at Mid-Essex Technical College were as unremarkable as my school years. They had, however, succeeded in pointing me in a career direction – towards the world of business. While I continued to believe in the maxim that ‘something will turn up but I don’t know what it will be’, I increasingly felt that the ‘something’ would one day involve running a company or venture of my own.

At the age of twenty-one, I was offered – and accepted – my first proper job as a management trainee with Rothmans (then known as Carreras), the cigarette manufacturer. Back in 1967, my starting salary was the grand sum of £925 per annum. I was delighted to discover that I was the only non-graduate of six trainees on the scheme. I felt that I had caught up after failing to get on a university degree course myself. With hindsight, I was perhaps a little too pleased with myself because I soon discovered that my free spirit did not fit well into a company structure.