How a waiter named Mo survived two terrible traumas to become a billionaire and Tory party treasurer

One of my children was once required to be in hospital, in isolation, for 10 days. He was a teenager and it was difficult. For hours, he saw no one. When we visited, he was overwhelmed to see us, desperate for company.

Thankfully, he was fine but the trauma of this episode came back while reading Drive to Succeed, the autobiography of Mohamed Mansour, the billionaire businessman and now senior Conservative Party treasurer.

My son was discharged within two weeks; after a terrible car accident that nearly saw him lose a leg, Mansour was confined to bed for almost three years. He was aged 10 when the crash happened, on Revolution Day in 1958, marking the uprising in Egypt six years earlier that toppled King Farouk. That formative period growing up, of making new friends, playing sports, was denied to Mansour.

Often, he had no visitors. “Hour after hour, day after day, I lay in bed. Barred from moving or being moved, I would sleep sitting up in my room. The cast was so heavy that a pillow was put behind my back and my arm tucked under my chin. That is how I would doze off, but it was not comfortable.”

The hospital and then his family cared for him. But his wealthy, Egyptian parents were busy, as were his brothers, “so all I had were my Batman, Superman and Lone Ranger comic books, which I would read endlessly”.

Mansour had to endure watching them go away on a family holiday for three weeks without him, while he would be looked after by their staff. “Some friends visited but I still felt like a forgotten person, with everyone getting on with their lives without me.”

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Reading this I was reminded too of a 16-year-old Gordon Brown who lost an eye playing rugby and was also in hospital on his own for months as doctors fought to save his other eye. For Brown, it was the beginning of the crafting of his political credo.

There is a sense of that with Mansour, of both overcoming any obstacles in his path and possessing a steely determination to succeed. After that ordeal, anything was surmountable.

Incredibly, there was plenty more. Aged just 15, he was sent to America to study at university in Raleigh, North Carolina. When he arrived at the airport, his brothers were due to meet him. They were nowhere to be seen.

He joined a fraternity, loved it, but then had to leave when his father’s cotton business in Egypt was nationalised by the Nasser government. To survive in the US, the young Mansour worked as a waiter, earning $1.25 an hour.

Then, another blow. As he was due to begin studying for an MBA, he was struck by kidney cancer. No sooner did Mansour recover and achieve his qualification and begin a career in commerce than more disaster. His father had taken the cotton producer to number one in Egypt before Nasser intervened. He did the same in neighbouring Sudan, only for the exact same thing to occur. The new socialist regime there confiscated the family’s assets.

His father picked himself up and began again, this time moving into cars, becoming a distributor in Alexandria for General Motors. Mansour and a brother joined him, only for their father to die soon afterwards.

The boys were on their own, but they resolved to carry on. Mansour went on to build a multinational empire. Today, his Man Capital is one of the biggest companies in North Africa and the Middle East, with a myriad of interests across the globe, in automobiles, trucks, tech, real estate, hospitality, and finance. It partners with some of the world’s best-known brands including GM, Caterpillar and McDonald’s, and employs tens of thousands of people. Not for nothing is the book subtitled, The Making of an Egyptian Titan.

Still, the roller-coaster was not finished. Mansour was persuaded to become Egypt’s transport minister and resigned from more than 50 directorships, among them Coca-Cola and Credit Agricole. He’d been in post a matter of weeks when a ferry sank in the Red Sea, killing 1,031 people.

He threw himself body and soul into dealing with the aftermath. He made progress in improving Egypt’s creaking infrastructure but ran up against the fact it wasn’t his money he was deploying. “In government, the funds at stake belong to your country and its citizens. This made me more emotionally affected by the ups and downs of political life.”

Nobody wanted to pay higher rail fares or pay to use roads that they treated as free of charge. But without that extra cash, there was little prospect of serious, vital investment. “I realised then, if I did not know it already, that being a politician in the developing world is a thankless job.”

How so was made apparent towards the end of his stint when a train filled with passengers hit another that had stopped after running into a cow. The freak collision, south of Cairo reportedly killed at least 50 people.

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He was an outsider in government and worse, a successful one at that. He had few public supporters inside and outside politics. The media targeted him, with one newspaper running the headline “Mansour is to blame”. He quit and for a period turned his back on Egypt completely, relocating to London. His timing was opportune, as in the subsequent revolution in his native country he would almost certainly have been arrested and imprisoned.

Mansour made London his base. He adores the UK and its capital. “The UK has given me a second home and a security, as well as a sanctuary and base to foster a global business.” That’s why he says he puts something back, donating heavily to the party of Winston Churchill and serving as its treasurer.

Some might quibble with likening the present crop of Tory leaders to Churchill, but that’s his choice. Equally, he was a major backer of the national memorial at St Paul’s for those in the UK who died due to Covid-19.

He still retains a softness for Egypt, returning often and building a splendid house overlooking his beloved Pyramids. There’s a humility to Mansour that is not always present in others of his ilk. “I am one of the luckiest people on the planet, having overcome huge medical challenges before being able to achieve wealth and construct a business empire that is global and still expanding. The value in my life is also fundamentally measured in having a family who mean everything to me.”

The Tory party could learn a lot from him. Certainly, they can count themselves fortunate to have him.