It is idiotic of billionaires guilty Rishi for inflation

More bad news for Rishi Sunak: the Conservatives have lost the billionaire vote. Well, not all billionaires. But last week the richest Briton, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, whose estimated wealth is £23.5 billion, declared his support for Labour and Sir Keir Starmer (‘a sensible guy… we need a change’).

And John Caudwell, who cashed out for £1.5 billion when in 2006 he sold his mobile phone business to private equity groups, announced: ‘I can declare publicly that I will vote for Labour, and I encourage everyone to do the same.’

This made a bigger splash since, just ahead of the 2019 general election, Caudwell had made a £500,000 donation to the Conservative party.

But it was hardly a surprise that the founder of the now defunct retailer, Phones 4U, had done a switcheroo: Last September, he gave an interview expressing fury that Sunak had slammed the brakes on a number of Boris Johnson‘s ‘net zero’ targets, such as delaying by five years to 2035 an outright ban on all new petrol and diesel car sales.

‘I’m beyond shocked and I’m horrified,’ Caudwell raged, adding that ‘the environmental apocalypse is coming’. It might have been a member of Just Stop Oil talking.

That lot are a most unmaterialistic bunch, and, in like spirit, this billionaire has declared: ‘I don’t crave materialistic things.’ However, he made this remark in an interview two years ago for the magazine Boat International, while on board his superyacht, the 240-ft Titania.

And on August 29 last year, Caudwell posted footage of his helicopter landing at his stonking Staffordshire Grade I listed Broughton Hall, along with this tweeted message to the toiling masses: ‘Are you back to work today? My helicopter is an amazing time-saver for commuting between my home in London, where most of my business is, to my country house in Staffordshire.’

Caudwell’s ‘home in London’ is in fact Britain’s most extravagant, and we know this because he has taken great delight in showing it off. The result of knocking together two Mayfair mansions, to create a dwelling of 43,000 sq ft, it is said to be worth £250 million.

Among the Caudwell-esque modifications, one newspaper reported: ‘The ‘car-stacker’ is John’s favourite toy, as it can take eight cars from street level to storage at the press of a button.’

Caudwell insisted ‘it was just a matter of making everything very tasteful’. Such as the 20,000 sheets of gold leaf used throughout. And then there is the ballroom, about which the 71-year-old Caudwell told a reporter: ‘Who else has a room like this? Well, other than Buckingham Palace, of course.’

Imagine how he would live were he not weighed down with moral concern about the risks to the planet from carbon emissions and the fact that he doesn’t ‘crave materialistic things’.

On Newsnight last week, the Birmingham-born Caudwell was gently questioned about his political flip-flopping, and reminded by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott that he had backed Liz Truss to succeed Boris Johnson.

Perhaps you are ‘politically naive’, she suggested. Caudwell’s non-sequitur of a response was unintentionally hilarious: ‘If I’m naive, how did I build a business in a tough environment that made a £1.5 billion sell-out?’

I was immediately reminded of the Stan Herbert character from the 1990s comedy show Harry Enfield and Chums. In a Brummie accent, Herbert/Enfield would invariably terminate every discussion with the words: ‘I am considerably richer than yow!’

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who is ‘considerably richer’ than John Caudwell, is also at the opposite end of the political spectrum when it comes to net zero. Which is hardly surprising, as his vast fortune is based entirely on brilliantly-timed debt-financed investments in the petrochemical industry.

So, just days after endorsing Starmer, the founder of Ineos, when asked about Labour’s pledge to decarbonise the UK’s electricity system by 2030 at The Times ‘CEO summit’ in London, burst into incredulous laughter.

‘Where’s it all going to come from? Gas is fundamentally important for electricity supply.’ Ratcliffe then laid into Labour’s plans to cut out the system of tax allowances for North Sea oil and gas schemes, and to refuse all new exploration licences:

‘If we shut down the North Sea, what is that accomplishing? Because we’ll just have to import.’ So why on earth is this hydrocarbon magnate backing Labour? I’ve no idea.

But some in government speculate that he is cross with the Conservatives for giving a thumbs-down to his request that they put taxpayers’ money into his scheme to build a new stadium at Old Trafford, home of Manchester United.

Ratcliffe, a Lancastrian, recently paid to take control of that most renowned of all English football clubs, and set up a committee for the regeneration of Old Trafford. Gary Neville, the former United player who last week starred in a Labour election broadcast, has been invited to join that committee.

Ratcliffe has argued for taxpayers’ money to be poured into what would be a £2 billion project, on the grounds that it would be ‘a catalyst to regenerate southern Manchester’.

But as someone in the Government told me: ‘Why should taxpayers subsidise one of the richest men in Britain, and one of the richest football clubs?’

Perhaps Ratcliffe thinks he would get more change out of Starmer, an avid football fan. Although given that Sir Jim, once he had secured his knighthood in 2018, relocated to the tax haven of Monaco, the appropriate response from a Labour government would be to tell him to come back and pay his dues.

So is there anything that does unite these two billionaires in their reasons for spurning Sunak? Actually, there is.

Last week, they both said that Sunak’s Covid furlough scheme, when Chancellor, was the main reason for the high inflation that did so much to increase the strain on the nation’s households (not theirs, obviously).

They are both wrong, embarrassingly so. The cause of our high inflation was a mixture of complacent interest rate policy from the independent Bank of England, its incontinent money printing (‘quantitative easing’ or QE) — and, later, the effect of the Ukraine war.

The only politician who warned presciently about the inflationary risks was Rishi Sunak, who, as Chancellor, told MPs in March 2021: ‘While government borrowing costs are affordable right now, interest rates and inflation might not stay low for ever, and just a one per cent increase in both would cost us over £25 billion a year.’

Three months earlier, he warned: ‘There is this very large QE thing that’s going on. No one has done that before. There are plenty of smart investors who are also thinking of the risks of inflation.’

But which genius said, after Boris Johnson was forced out, that ‘I haven’t seen Liz [Truss] do too much wrong, so, probably give her a chance to show she can really perform’? Yes, John Caudwell.

Now he says: ‘I will be doing my best to influence them [Labour] wherever I can.’ God help us if they listen.