22 The Sunday Times February 13, 2022
NEWS REVIEW
Bristol Temple Meads
was a “railway
cathedral” to a young
Justin Webb. Far right,
the TikTok trainspotter
Francis Bourgeoiscleaning company called Pritchard
Group Services, where he met his first
wife, Wendy, who died last week, then
struck out on his own. In 1974, aged 28, he
borrowed £15,000 from Barclays to buy a
loss-making cleaning business. He
worked seven days a week turning Uni-
Kleen around and three years later sold it
for £1.3 million to Reckitt & Colman.
Ashcroft ploughed the proceeds into
the takeover of Hawley Goodall, a strug-
gling tent maker, which he turned into a
conglomerate with stakes in a dizzying
range of unrelated companies including
Lotus Cars, Miss World and Debbie
Moore’s Pineapple Dance Studios. Haw-
ley bought the American security giant
ADT in 1987, from which he ended up
making more than half a billion dollars.
Ashcroft relished his money. He mar-
ried his secretary, Susi. She took flying
lessons and occasionally ferried him
between meetings in her helicopter (reg-
istration plate: GO SUE). He befriended
the model Paula Hamilton, famous for
appearing, made up to look like Diana,
Princess of Wales, in a VW Golf advert. He
met the real thing, too: Ashcroft caused a
stir at a ballet fundraising dinner in 1990
when he casually let his arm slip across
the back of a chair occupied by Diana.
Ashcroft has also been generous. He
created the Crimestoppers hotline,
funded the Ashcroft Technology Acad-
emy — a state school in southwest London
— and gave the world’s biggest collection
of Victoria Cross medals to the Imperial
War Museum. He and Susi throw parties
at the Grosvenor House hotel, Park Lane,
to mark significant birthdays. At 2019’s
Monet-themed event, about 500 guests,
including May, who was then prime min-
ister, were greeted by women dressed as
talking flowers. Lionel Richie performed.B
ut why does a billionaire with two
yachts and all the privileged access
immense wealth brings spend so
much time publishing books that
are bound to have a limited audi-
ence? Some, such as Victoria Cross Heroes
and Falklands War Heroes, speak to his
personal interests. Others such as Call Me
Dave, written with the former Sunday
Times political editor Isabel Oakeshott,
and First Lady, researched by a team led
by the former Mail on Sunday journalist
Miles Goslett, appear to give him an ongo-
ing voice in the upper echelons of Tory
politics. Ashcroft, who was deputy chair-
man of the party from 2005-10, was seen
as having a particular animus towards
Cameron, whom he perceived as having
been too soft on liberal issues.
Others still, such as the forthcoming
Life Support, a book on the NHS with
Oakeshott, seem to be written simply
because Ashcroft cares about the subject.
Unfair Game, an exposé of South Africa’s
canned lion-hunting industry falls into
this category. The book contributed to
South Africa’s decision to end the prac-
tice last year.“It’s just a desire to be part of
the game,” says his ally. “He’s contribut-
ing massively to the public debate on
issues of importance.”
Basham, who says Ashcroft has made a
journey “from spiv to seer”, is more cyni-
cal about his motivations. “There is one
side to Michael and it’s called Michael,”
he says. “It’s ego, unbridled.”
And Ashcroft’s old City friend sees an
element of the same relentless drive that
took him from Maidenhead waiter to Beli-
zean billionaire.
“Michael is always looking for
heaven,” he says. “Heaven might have
been with lots and lots of money, and it
wasn’t there. It might have been with lots
of women everywhere, and it wasn’t
there. And then he was looking for
power. And he’s still looking for heaven.
It’s always frustrating him.”studies at Mid-Essex Technical College in
Chelmsford, which was subsumed into
what became Anglia Ruskin University.
He was clearly grateful for the start it gave
him: he was the university’s chancellor
between 2001 and 2020, and donated
£10 million for the creation of the Lord
Ashcroft International Business School.
“He doesn’t come from a particularly
prepossessing background and he didn’t
have a glittering academic career,” says
one observer. “He was not socially well
connected. And I think it drove him.”
Ashcroft made a virtue of his chippi-
ness in the public school-dominated City
of the 1980s. Brian Basham, his PR
adviser in the early years, tells a story
about an encounter in a wine bar. “He
looked across the bar and scowled and
said: ‘That f***er over there turned me
down for funding last week.’ It was a sen-
ior fund manager. Michael said: ‘I’m not
going to let him get away with it.’ He
walked over to him and I thought he was
going to remonstrate with him, that there
was going to be a scene. But he grabbed
this rather stern-looking Old Etonian
type and kissed him and said: ‘Darling, I
haven’t seen you in such a long time!’
This chap was with a bunch of equally
snooty-looking blokes. He turned abso-
lutely bright red. It was delightful.”
Above all, Ashcroft seemed conscious
of the need to work harder than more
expensively educated adversaries. In
1989, his company took a stake in Chris-
tie’s. His old City friend recalls the first
board meeting Ashcroft attended. “He
turned up at lunch and he said: ‘Right,
I’m going to go round the table and point
out who’s the grammar-school boy and
who’s the public-school boy’, which you
can imagine went down pretty badly,” he
says. “He’s always been hugely anti-estab-
lishment but at the same time wanting all
the establishment prizes.”
Having worked as a waiter in Maiden-
head and a pool attendant in Chelmsford,
Ashcroft started his business career aged
21 with two years as a management
trainee at the cigarette-maker Rothmans.
He worked as a finance assistant at aA
new book, First Lady:
Intrigue at the Court of Carrie
and Boris Johnson, paints
an unflattering picture of
No 10’s fairer occupant.
Carrie Symonds, as she was
known until her marriage to
the prime minister last May,
emerges as an attention-
seeking control freak who
impersonates her husband in text messa-
ges and whispers prompts while he
speaks to ministers on the phone.
Carrie, 33, is said to have ousted more
attractive and intelligent female rivals.
Johnson, 57, is said to be trapped in a
“toxic” relationship that leaves him
squandering his potential. Carrie’s
spokesman dismisses these as “vile fabri-
cations”; Johnson is said to be furious
about what he sees as a “hit job”.
But arguably a more interesting biog-
raphy subject would be the book’s com-
missioner and co-author, the billionaire
Brexit backer and former Conservative
Party treasurer Lord Ashcroft, himself
not exactly underendowed with cunning
and ego.
The son of a colonial civil servant, who
made a fortune in the racy City of the
1980s and 1990s, Ashcroft throws lavish
parties in Mayfair attended by Tory gran-
dees including Lord Hague of Richmond
and Theresa May. Now in his eighth dec-
ade, he also amuses himself and exer-
cises influence by publishing provocative
— sometimes spiteful — biographies of
political figures. In Call Me Dave in 2015
he accused David Cameron, in effect, of
molesting a dead pig as part of a univer-
sity dining society’s initiation ceremony.
An ally describes him as a political
“shit-stirrer” with a “wonderful sense of
humour and mischief ”. A former journal-
ist who knew him in his wheeler-dealer
heyday says he is a “really cold, calculat-
ing, vengeful man”. Even an old City
friend remarks: “He is very loyal and he’s
as straight as the day is long — as long you
don’t cross him. But if you do cross him,
he is not an enemy you want.”
The Carrie Johnson book revives a
question that has swirled since Ashcroft
emerged as a player in Tory circles in the
early 1990s: who is this idiosyncratic and
occasionally opaque character who exer-
cises so much influence over British pub-
lic life?
Ashcroft, 75, once said there were two
things the average Briton disliked: “One
is failure, the other is success.” This whip-
smart grammar-school boy has had a
love-hate relationship with the establish-
ment and the press. A sometime tax exile
who declares himself a patriot and col-
lects Victoria Crosses, he became the
Conservatives’ treasurer and biggest
donor in 1998, the year after New
Labour’s first landslide victory.
Ashcroft faced a battle to enter the
House of Lords: he was nominated for a
peerage in 1999 by Hague, then leader of
the Tory opposition, but was rejected by
the cross-party political honours scrutiny
committee amid a storm of negative
newspaper articles.
That year, Ashcroft sued The Times
over allegations about his activities in
Belize, the tax haven where many of his
business interests have been based. The
dispute was settled without a penny
changing hands and, in a front-page state-
ment, The Times accepted it had no evi-
dence that Ashcroft had “been suspected
of money laundering or drug-related
crimes”. In turn, the tycoon said he
intended “to reorganise his affairs in
order to return to live in Britain”.
Ashcroft accused New Labour — specif-
ically Tony Blair’s press secretary,
Alastair Campbell — of leaking inaccurate
information about him in a politically
motivated campaign. He sued the For-
eign Office for the release of what his QC
described as an Ashcroft “dirt file”, forc-
ing the government to apologise and pay
costs of almost £500,000.
Ashcroft undertook to become a per-
manent UK resident — quickly watered
down to a promise that he would be a
long-term UK resident — and was made a
life peer in March 2000.
Controversy erupted again a decade
later when Ashcroft admitted he had in
fact remained non-domiciled in the UK
for tax purposes. In 2010, the law was
changed so that anyone sitting in parlia-He had stakes
in Pineapple
Dance Studios
and Miss World
Ashcroft, who gave his Victoria Cross
collection to the Imperial War
Museum, top, has a home in Belize.
His book angered Carrie Johnson, leftTop, Ashcroft taking his oath in the
Lords, and with Brexit backers
including Nigel Farage, centrePenzance, leaving for
Manchester or Plymouth. The
faces of the passengers in the
yellow light those
compartments used to have.
The mixture of tiredness and
excitement that a long
journey can bring. People
lugging themselves away
from things, towards things.
I never collected the
numbers. They didn’t interest
me. I collected the thrill of
the order of it all, the
achievement. I wonder
sometimes whether it fitted
the search for masculinity
that kindled my love of rugby:
big units, big engines dancing
close to each other, kept in
check by timetables, rules
written by smaller people,
away from the tumult.
Why me? Why Francis? Or
more to the point: why not
my son or my daughters?None are interested in trains,
in fact they dislike them.
“Two hours!” my elder
daughter Martha used to
moan when I first put her on
the train to Exeter University.
“What will I do?” Seriously.
Read? Look out of the
window? Enjoy the rattle of
the points, the stations along
the way?
I spend a good deal of time
in Bath, whose station is
smaller but still boasts a lively
life of comings and goings, to
Portsmouth, to London, to
Cardiff, to Bristol to
Weymouth. As a family, we
eat sometimes in the
steakhouse that looks over
the platforms (hey, it’s nicer
than it sounds).
Watching the trains.
Spotting the late arrivals. The
carriages in a strange
formation. The new bullet-
fronted Hitachi units,
sometimes joined together,
sometimes in a single form.
The family raise their eyes to
the heavens and carry on
talking among themselves.
Only Francis Bourgeois
and I know how wrong they
are. The inner joy of being at
one with trains is a lifelong
comfort. They really do take
the strain.Justin Webb’s memoir, The Gift
of a Radio: My Childhood and
other Train Wrecks, is
published by Penguinleaves Bridport station in
Dorset, and calls at Maiden
Newton and Southampton
before hurtling, non-stop, to
London. Commuters read
newspapers. There’s an
at-table meal service.
It’s a ghost train. There
never has been an express
from Bridport to London.
The sleepy market town is
unlikely ever to have been
home to commuters.
Certainly not in a Pullman. In
fact no trains at all have left
Bridport in modern times.
The station closed in 1975. It
was demolished.
But not in my mind. I can
see it still. Waiting at the
single platform, three
carriages, a stub-nosed diesel
engine at the front (class 31,
Francis, since you ask). Still
figures, made of plastic,
outside the café. All of it in
my bedroom, on a track that
took up the floor. Bridport — I
have no idea why I chose it —
was my station. I adopted it at
the age of around nine and
ran a highly efficient service
until I came home one
holiday from boarding school
and found it had been sold.
In my strange, lonely
childhood trains were a
source of escape. I was the
anti-Beeching. I constructed
timetables linking Bridport to
London and imagined a
world of people hurrying
gratefully between home andMy love of
railways
kept me on
the straight
and narrow
I
s it safe, finally, to come
out of the closet? It may
be, thanks to a mechanical
engineering student at
Nottingham University
who has broken the last
taboo. So much in the
modern world is allowed,
accepted, celebrated even,
which in my childhood would
have been a source of shame.
But, until recently, not this.
Not trainspotting.
There, I said it. But only
because the student, Francis
Bourgeois, said it first. The
nerdy looking 21-year-old
started posting TikTok videos
of his train-linked exploits
(“Goodbye to the Class 456s”
is a classic) and the rest is
viral marketing history. North
Face and Gucci are using him
in adverts. He’ll almost
certainly ditch his degree —
shades of Mick Jagger at the
LSE — marry a supermodel
and live in a penthouse flat
with a view of tracks:
Clapham Junction perhaps.
But the wider service he
has performed is to make an
interest in trains sexy. Well,
all right: to make an interest
in trains vaguely socially
acceptable.
I am glad because my own
interest in them is not some
jolly little hobby. It goes to the
very essence of who I am.
Trains rescued me when I
was young.
An early morning PullmanLEONID ANDRONOV/GETTY IMAGESModel trains — and the
fullsize ones pulling in and
out of Bristol Temple Meads
station — provided a
route out of a lonely
childhood for the
broadcaster Justin Webb
work. At weekends imaginary
model families, of a kind I saw
in Ladybird books, would
make the journey on
reduced-price tickets.
Occasionally, as a treat, my
mother would take me to see
the real thing.
We lived not far from
Bristol Temple Meads station,
which is a glorious railway
cathedral, a dozen or more
platforms, very wide in the
central part, curving gently
and stylishly to their tips
outside in the rain and the
chaos of points and tracks.
At dusk, in the 1970s, you
could stand at the end of a
platform and see 12-carriage
cross-country monsters
pulled by huge locomotives
(class 47s mainly, Francis)
arriving from Edinburgh orment would be treated as UK-domiciled
by the tax authorities. That was the case
for Ashcroft over the next five years.
Ashcroft quit the Lords in 2015 to con-
centrate on political polling and publish-
ing, including his ownership of the influ-
ential website ConservativeHome,
although he retains his title. Ashcroft’s
polling operation began with a merciless
dissection of the Tories’ 2005 loss in a
report called “Smell the Coffee”. It is
closely watched because of the size of its
samples and because its polls are done at
constituency level — a rarity.A
shcroft’s main home has always
been Belize and after 2015 he was
once again officially a non-dom. He
enjoys outsized influence in the
central American country, whose
former prime minister once said his net
worth might equal its GDP and compared
the dynamic with “new-age slavery”. His
family was dragged into the spotlight last
year when his daughter-in-law, Jasmine
Hartin, was charged with manslaughter
in connection with the shooting of a
police superintendent near a jetty.
Born in Chichester, West Sussex, Ash-
croft first set eyes on Belize aged seven
when his father was posted to what was
then British Honduras after a spell in
Nyasaland, now Malawi. He was sent
back to Britain for boarding school three
years later as the family moved to Eastern
Nigeria, later Biafra.
Rowdy and restless, Ashcroft left
grammar schools in Norwich and High
Wycombe with one A-level (maths) and
did a higher national diploma in businessThe billionaire
lord taking
aim at Carrie
CLARA MOLDEN/DAILY TELEGRAPH/CAMERA PRESSLord Ashcroft laid out his case against
Carrie Johnson in the Daily Mail last
weekend. “As the first prime
ministerial consort with a political
career of her own, I believe she easily
warrants a biography,” he wrote.
He said he had set out with “no
agenda other than to write accurately
about what I found — but what I found
surprised me”. The book claims shepretended she had fractured her leg
to wangle a better hotel during a party
conference and lost her job at party
HQ after being accused of fiddling
expenses. It also traces her alleged
involvement in the wallpaper, party
and Afghan airlift scandals.
“My intention is not to destabilise
the prime minister,” Ashcroft wrote.
“But the evidence I have gathered
suggests his wife’s behaviour is
preventing him from leading Britain as
effectively as the voters deserve.”
She denies all the claims.HIS CASE AGAINST
THE PM’S CONSORT
Michael Ashcroft
is a pollster,
philanthropist,
website owner,
Tory grandee —
and author of
scurrilous
biographies,
including of
the prime
minister’s wife.
What’s driving
him, asks
Oliver Shah