Who needs enemies when you have siblings like Duncan Bannatyne’s? Relations
between the “nasty dragon” from the BBC’s Dragons’ Den and two of his
younger brothers, Bill and Sandy, have degenerated to such a spectacular
extent that they’ve added their names to an “I Hate Duncan Bannatyne” page
on Facebook. To be precise, they were among the first on it. The group has
now been taken down. For connoisseurs of feuds, this is the best show in
town.
“It’s true I don’t get on with them,” sighs the businessman. He’s in the
chairman’s office of his Darlington headquarters (named, with characteristic
bombast, Powerhouse). Behind his tan he seems agitated. He is not smiling
his Colgate smile. He couldn’t be further, in fact, from the snappy,
snarling businessman he is on telly, cutting dead the dreams of off-duty
accountants and their helicopter armchairs and reversible cat litter trays,
alongside his fellow dragons Deborah Meaden, Peter Jones, Theo Paphitis and
James Caan. (With a fortune estimated, by himself, at £310m, Bannatyne is by
far the wealthiest of them.)
Ostensibly, the feud started at a party three years ago: “It was my wife’s
40th birthday. All the drink was free. I invited all my family. They came
and they started a fight. They smuggled out whisky bottles under their coat
at the end of the night.”
So this is all about hospitality and hurt feelings? Or something that
Bannatyne arguably knows more about: money?
“One of my brothers said, ‘Why doesn’t he give us a million pounds, then we’d
be happy’,” he continues. “But they wouldn’t be happy. The rest of my family
support me. They feel the same. I think, actually, their problem is they
hate themselves. They hate their lives. It’s not just me they hate - they
hate everyone. The world. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve got other things to
think about. I love my life.”
Well, there’s plenty to love. When Bannatyne threw his 60th birthday party
recently, the boxer Joe Calzaghe, interior designer Kelly Hoppen and racing
driver David Coulthard were among the guests (Bill and Sandy were not).
Chesney Hawkes was the entertainment. “That song”, says Bannatyne, referring
to Hawkes’s 1991 hit The One and Only, “is my song.”
He’s right. Through a mixture of barmy egocentricity and determination - not
to mention a spectacular lack of self-awareness that has no doubt
jet-powered his small-screen career - Bannatyne has come a long way from his
poor upbringing as the second of seven children in Clydebank,
Dunbartonshire. After an abortive career in the navy - he was dishonourably
discharged for threatening to throw an officer overboard - he started an
ice-cream van business that made him a success and a nursing home business
that made him a millionaire. Bannatyne’s gyms put him in the top rank of
British entrepreneurs.
Then Dragons’ Den made him a celebrity. He saw Noel Gallagher meeting Tony
Blair at Downing Street in 1997 and wondered why he wasn’t there: “I
thought, I’m a successful entrepreneur, creating jobs - why should rock
stars be invited and not me? I wanted a profile. So I got a PR man. And then
Dragons’ Den came up.”
Now somewhere between Donald Trump and Len Goodman of Strictly Come Dancing,
Bannatyne gets “invited to Chequers”, he says, where he has the opportunity
to lecture his friend the prime minister on economic theory. For example:
“We need to stop the banks lending to each other.” Isn’t one of the
economy’s main problems that inter-bank lending has all but collapsed? “No,
no, no. The system would be much better if they stopped lending to each
other. They’re just sending the same pot of money around and around and
every time someone takes commission out of it. I don’t see why they do it .
. . Supermarkets don’t lend fruit and veg to each other.”
He also has strong views on smoking: “I’d like everyone to stop. It’s
disgusting. I think it should be law that you can’t smoke in a car with a
child. Also, you shouldn’t be able to smoke on the streets.” Where would you
be allowed to smoke? “Nowhere, really. In your own house if you wanted.”
Most of his policies begin at home. Bannatyne has six children, four by his
first wife and two by his second. (This second marriage briefly hit the
rocks when Bannatyne took a sabbatical to date “a newsreader and a model” -
he insists his playboy days are behind him.) His children have a clause in their trust funds forbidding them to smoke. One of his daughters had her
£400-a-month allowance cut off because he “smelt smoke in her bedroom”.
“That was a long time ago,” says Bannatyne, who clearly sees no problem
controlling his family with money. “And it only lasted a couple of months.
It’s not a big trust fund anyway. I don’t want to leave a lot of money to my
children. When I die, the majority’s going to go to charity.”
It’s sweet that he likes giving back - but nothing happens in Bannatyne’s
world unless it happens to him. When he encounters Romanian refugees, he
sets up an orphanage. When he visits Ethiopia as a trustee of Comic Relief,
he becomes an evangelist for the cause. Last week he was rehearsing a Comic
Relief dance special with his fellow dragons Jones and Meaden, despite being
“tone deaf, with no sense of rhythm”. Many of his views about the economy
seem to come from a personal standpoint. Asked what he would do about the
number of unemployed graduates, he responds that his two older daughters are
all right because they are both employed, “although maybe not in the jobs
they want”.
While this solipsism is doubtless the secret of his success, there are moments
when the blinkers are so huge that you wonder that he can see at all. He
confides that he’d love to expand his business, but can’t: “There are a
couple of great deals out there but I can’t do anything about it because
raising the money is so difficult at the moment ... I don’t want Bank A to
lend to Bank B to lend to Bank C. I want them to lend to me!”
Never mind the worldwide economic crisis. Gordon, pal, are you listening?
Duncan Bannatyne is a trustee of Comic Relief. Red Nose Day is on Friday,
March 13
