It’s not unusual for corporate bigwigs to try to wield their power ahead of a big political event. The evening before the EU referendum, some of the biggest names in business made a last-ditch plea for voters to back Remain in an open letter.
Bosses from financial giants including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, the London Stock Exchange, Prudential and KKR were all there. So too were signatures from law firms and accounting giants as well as around 50 leaders from the FTSE 100. But even though Remain had all the star power, Leave still won the vote.
It was worth a shot. It had only been a year earlier that more than 100 senior business figures, including at least five who previously backed Labour, warned in an open letter that a Labour government would “threaten jobs and deter investment” in what marked the closest election campaign in years.
A month later, David Cameron returned to Downing Street with an outright majority after Labour was virtually wiped out by the SNP in Scotland and the Liberal Democrat vote collapsed. Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage all stood down in the space of an hour.
So you can hardly blame Sir Keir Starmer for hoping to reap the rewards of his lengthy pro-business push with a first-class list of his own. Behind closed doors high-profile executives have been giving Labour officials the nod that they are onside, and with just over a month to go until the election the party wanted them to put pen to paper.
Many have been won over by Sir Keir’s awareness that “there’s no magic money tree” and that economic growth is vital, as one boardroom veteran put it. But that hush-hush show of support doesn’t translate into public cheerleading. Not long after Labour published a letter signed by 120 executives supporting the party last week, Rachel Reeves was asked why no FTSE 100 bosses had signed it. With few heavyweight names, one critic dismissed the effort as “p--- poor”.
Conservatives who have been rubbing their hands with glee ever since the list was criticised shouldn’t feel too smug, because they’re not going to get a blockbuster letter of endorsement either. Labour’s list may have been ridiculed by some for lacking big-hitting names, but that doesn’t mean those names are voting for the other side. All this proves is that the days of City fat cats opining over politics are over.
As one boss says of the list, nobody wants to put their head above the parapet publicly because it will only get cut off. And anyway, he continues, businessmen make poor politicians and nobody wants to hear it anymore. Those days are long gone.
“What if you want to be in the cool gang but then you realise the cool gang is smoking crack and you don’t want to be in the cool gang?” he says, deciding that it’s best to appear neutral himself.
Even the bosses who are desperate to back one of the main parties publicly are being restrained by their PR advisers, who have been reminding their more vocal clients in slightly politer terms that the days of playing politics are no more. It was fine to be loud in the run-up to the historic Brexit vote, but this is different.
Politicians aren’t listening. As Labour’s lead narrows and Rishi Sunak spots a faint glimmer of hope, both parties will be racing for a high-profile endorsement ahead of the July 4 election.
No doubt some will emerge – Tory donor and billionaire financier Michael Spencer last week told The Telegraph he had just donated £250,000 to the party while sounding a warning about Labour – but examples of this sort of public championing will be few and far between.
Another long-standing Tory donor and businessman did not want to indulge the conversation when contacted, merely saying that he has decided to support individual MPs instead.
The attitude is very different in America, where Wall Street leaders are much more likely to wade into divisive political debates. Blackstone chief Steve Schwarzman has said he will back Donald Trump in the 2024 election, while hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman expressed support for Trump late last week after the former president was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records.
In the City, senior executives are only talking politics in hushed tones while in busy restaurants. One partner tells me over lunch that he would never reveal his political thinking on this election to colleagues. He was planning to vote Labour but is now considering voting Conservative, he says in a whisper. He thinks the Tories might be a safer bet for the economy, but will keep that to himself as he believes most of his peers will be voting Labour.
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