New Tory treasurer Michael Spencer is super-rich, super-generous and super-confident of getting David Cameron into Downing Street. Photograph by Nicky Johnston
It’s lunchtime and we are in Michael Spencer’s offices six floors above Broadgate, where he has invited me to join the half dozen movers and shakers at the table sipping £250-a-bottle Léoville Las Cases 1990 and shooting the breeze about the latest takeover bids for the London Stock Exchange. Spencer, in open-neck shirt, is relaxed, chatty, even, but as the conversation veers on to the Tories’ electoral hopes, he starts to take notes.
Worth some £700m, Spencer is one of the City’s richest entrepreneurs and, now, the Conservatives’ new treasurer. His day job is heading Icap, the world’s largest inter-dealer brokerage, which acts as middleman between banks buying and selling bonds, and other bits of paper, and taking huge numbers of tiny commissions or ‘pips’ on transactions worth massive amounts of money. Over the last 20 years, he has transformed a swaps broking firm with four staff into a worldwide financial empire with daily transactions of some £500bn. Icap is worth around £3bn on the stock market and £100 of its shares bought in 1999 would now be worth closer to £1,000.
Already a party backer, Spencer’s attention has turned directly to helping the Tories win at the next General Election, though, in the past, he despaired of their ever doing so. Three years ago, the party was pulling itself under, with little at the surface and undercurrents of doom below. At least to Spencer’s mind, its new leader David Cameron is making the right kind of waves just as Labour appears to be mishearing the demands of the public.
‘Cameron has done a first-class job in getting back into the political centre stage and making the party electable once more,’ Spencer declares. ‘We have everything to play for and a great chance of winning next time. As the election results unfold through the night, with the Tory party returning to Downing Street, there will be a sense of excitement and achievement,’ he predicts, ‘and I want to have made a contribution.’
Not entirely surprisingly, Spencer, the son of a colonial civil servant and educated at Worth Abbey and Corpus Christi, Oxford, is a lifelong Tory, and even considered running for Parliament. As treasurer, he will be steering the party’s finances along a road lined with the controversy left by previous, wealthy incumbents; the overseas donations garnered by Baron Ashcroft ‘of Belize’ and the rows between Dixons billionaire Sir Stanley Kalms and ‘quiet man’ Ian Duncan Smith, among them. But the lie of the land is transformed; the chances better. ‘It’s not been an easy job for people like Jonathan Marland, George Magan or Stanley Kalms, or even, Michael Ashcroft or Phil Harris,’ he admits, ‘but the Conservative Party is more confident, team-oriented and determined than it has been for 15 years.’
On a personal level, he says, Cameron is ‘straight forward, very sincere, very realistic about the Conservatives’ position, and very practical about what needs to be done. There will come a point when he has to “harden” his message. That doesn’t mean there will be a long list of policies, but there will be a hard issue, not necessarily a popular issue, on which he takes a strong line and the public will see that we have somebody who has real strength.’
Tony Blair, Spencer describes as ‘an extra-ordinary, charismatic, but flawed, politician,’ and ‘relaxed, civil and capable of self-deprecation’. He adds, however: ‘Unquestionably, he will be an important component of political history but his actual, substantive achievements are disappointingly few.’ Gordon Brown he dismisses as ‘vain.’ Both Spencer and the dour Chancellor may share an interest in finance, philanthropy and Africa, but that’s all they have in common.
When it comes to charity giving, Spencer has made the Icap charity day, during which traders give up their own commissions, an example. It has raised close to £30m. ‘Everybody gives up 100 per cent of revenue, including whatever bonus they have made… They usually dress in mad fancy dress and the atmosphere is electric.’ Tory fundraisers should take note, however, when he says: ‘Only one person has ever said he didn’t want to come in that day. Needless to say, he doesn’t work here any more.’
Spencer’s interest in Africa extends from debating Zulu war tactics to, possibly, buying a home there and dates from his childhood. Born in Malaya, he spent much of it in Sudan and Ethiopia, where his mother, Diana, who spoke Amharic, travelled widely. ‘I am re-reading The Mountains of Rasselas,’ says Spencer. ‘It’s by a friend, Thomas Pakenham, and it’s about his travels in Ethiopia in the Fifties, when he had just left university. As we used to live in Ethiopia, I was recently given a first edition by my mother and she got Thomas to inscribe it.’
Beyond his roles at Icap and the Tory party, he owns City Index, the spread-betting firm, and chairs stockbroker Numis Securities. He has been married for two decades to his wife Lorraine and has three children: Patrick, Thomas and Alexandra. A great party-thrower, he famously flew singer Robbie Williams to his house in France at a rumoured cost of £1m, to surprise guests at his 50th birthday bash.
I ask him for his wish list of dinner guests. Aside from Lorraine, they include Lucian Freud; historians Anthony Beevor and Andrew Roberts; the ‘very funny’ Trevor Pickett, of Pickett the leather goods shop; Wasfi Kani of the Grange Park Opera, and art dealer David Ord Kerr. David Cameron, of course, is on it. But so too are Labour maverick Bob Marshall-Andrews and the fashion world’s Trinny and Susannah. Like any such list, it’s a quirky but instant snapshot of the people Spencer merits. The difference with this one is he could actually make it happen. If he does, I hope he remembers whose idea it was.