anybody. If given the chance, would Dolan
take the opportunity to scrap every piece of
Covid legislation and allow the public to act as
their conscience allows in the full knowledge
that whatever happens next would be
squarely on him? “In a heartbeat,” he replies
immediately. “If you told me now I could
go and address the nation? And would I put
my neck on the line? One hundred per cent.
I would bet all my money on it.”
Dolan’s route to wealth was not the
one he had initially hoped for. He’d grown
up dreaming of becoming a rock star – he
wrote songs and everything – but he ended
up working as an accountant. As a teenager,
he says he hated every minute of his time
at the King Edward VI Grammar School in
Chelmsford. “Because I was being told what to
do and being made to learn things I perceived
to be irrelevant. And still do. Ancient Greek.
Religious studies.”
He demonstrated early entrepreneurial flair
selling scratch cards in the playground and
working on a market stall at weekends, which
he far preferred to school. Which was just as
well because, after his O-levels (two Bs, two
Cs), he was told he would not be returning. So
he finished education at a local college and
then, hoping to emulate his hero Bowie, tried
to break into the music industry.
But when that didn’t really go anywhere,
he grudgingly took his accountant father’s
advice and trained as an accountant, only to
walk out of his first job when they wouldn’t
give him a pay rise. “Then I sold timeshares
for a bit, sold photocopiers and fax machines,”
he says. He was 21, doing well and learning
a lot. “And then I lost my driving licence to
drink driving. In those days, drinking and
driving wasn’t really frowned upon. Everybody
did it. I just happened to get caught.”
Unable to do his sales jobs and now on the
dole, in desperation he took out a £10 advert
in a local paper offering his services as an
accountant. After a few weeks of silence, a
florist responded to the advert and paid him
£100 to do her accounts. Gradually, in dribs
and drabs, work came in. What began, in 1992,
as one man working from his kitchen grew
into SJD Accountancy which was, in 2014,
acquired by a private equity firm in a deal
worth £100 million.
“The question I get asked quite a lot is,
‘You’ve made loads of money – why wouldyou ever want to go and make more?’ But it’s
a bit like asking a footballer who has just won
the World Cup why they would ever want
to play football? Because I just like kicking
a ball around.”
Dolan talks about a recent trip he made
to Sweden. He is, like many opponents of
lockdowns and mandatory mask wearing,
very keen on the so-called “Swedish model”
of dealing with Covid-19, which saw fewer
restrictions imposed on the population in the
hope of achieving herd immunity. Sweden, he
explains, was a relative paradise: people were
out and about, smiling at each other, having
drinks and pumping money into the economy.
“Swedish people were saying they have a
relationship with the government where the
government trusts them and therefore they
trust the government.”
So we argue a bit about Sweden. I say
that Sweden is Sweden and the UK is the
UK and you can’t just take the approach
of one country and then expect it to work
in another with a very different society,‘ANYONE WHO WANTS TO BE A POLITICIAN SHOULD
BE PROHIBITED FROM BECOMING ONE’