A billionaire Tory donor has said Keir Starmer is more receptive to his ideas than Rishi Sunak. John Caudwell was the Conservative party’s biggest donor in the run-up to the 2019 general election, during which he gave £500,000 to Boris Johnson’s campaign. But the founder of the now defunct mobile phone retailer Phones4U said he could no longer support the Tories in September and remained open to donating to the Labour party after Sunak chose to delay net zero measures. Caudwell said at the time he was “beyond shocked” at the prime minister’s decision to push back the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035.
Caudwell views the Tory’s net zero position as “nothing short of self-sabotage” and suggested on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions programme on Friday that the party leader with whom he has most in common was Starmer. “I’ve met with Keir Starmer and he is more receptive to my ideas than the Tory party,” he said. “Will that mean I donate? I can’t answer that. But what I can tell you is that any party that makes Britain great by having the right policies … I’ll donate to.” Caudwell said that he had proposed policies to the Conservative party that would “put the ‘great’ back into Great Britain, drive the GDP, drive the wealth for people again”, but received a more sympathetic response from the opposition. Speaking to the Sunday Times in September about Sunak’s net zero U-turn, the 70-year-old entrepreneur said he was “shocked and horrified” at the decision. “It won’t affect me because I’ll be long dead and buried,” he said. “[But] I am very worried about the future. The environmental apocalypse is coming and it’s coming very, very rapidly.” Caudwell’s growing warmth to the prospect of a Starmer premiership is a considerable about-turn from his position on the previous Labour leadership. He has said that he “mainly donated” to the Tory party in 2019 because he thought ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and ex-shadow chancellor John McDonnell “would have been a complete and utter disaster”. Writing in the Daily Mail in November 2019, the billionaire criticised Labour’s plans to raise taxes on the top 5% of earners and increase corporation tax, which he said would “quash aspiration, stymie enterprise and drive the nation’s wealth-creators abroad”.