‘An electoral liability’ – business loses patience with PM
“A confederacy of dunces,” sighed Crispin Odey, delivering his verdict on the MPs vying to dethrone Boris Johnson and lead the Tory party.
The hedge fund kingpin, once one of Johnson’s biggest backers, had just finished a long lunch with an old contact and was in devastating form.
“Who would you really want to run the Tory party?” said Odey. “Each of them has blown it. It’s come too early for some of them. I have no regard for Boris. He has never followed through on any policy. He was my friend until Brexit was done and then he just cut me dead.”
The Brexiter, who made hundreds of millions of pounds betting against sterling in the wake of the vote to the leave the EU in 2016, represents a growing chorus of leading business figures – from across the political spectrum – who have lost patience with the prime minister and the Tory party.
“I expect politicians to be appalling and to behave badly but even by their standards he behaves badly,” said Odey, frustrated that Johnson has not delivered the no-holds-barred Brexit he wanted to see, adding he concurs with the “anger” vented by the PM’s former adviser, Dominic Cummings.
Sir Philip Hampton, the former chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland, drugs giant GSK and Sainsbury’s, said traditional good relations between big business and the Conservatives had become increasingly frayed.
Business leaders have clashed with the government over the handling of Brexit and Covid in recent years, and relations have failed to recover from Johnson’s reported “f**k business” retort in 2018 to bosses’ concerns over a hard Brexit.
Hampton said: “Since the financial crisis, the Tories have been less clearly the party of business. The windfall tax [on energy giants] just underlines that.“Boris has become
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