Stuart Wheeler: The ace in Farage’s pack

“A very able man with time on his hands. That’s a dangerous combination.”

So said one acquaintance of Stuart Wheeler in response to the role the Ukip treasurer played in persuading Douglas Carswell, the dissident Tory MP, to switch sides. In pulling off this coup, the spread-betting tycoon and professional standard poker player has played a devastating hand against a Conservative Party that, in 2009, booted him out for donating £100,000 to its insurgent Eurosceptic opponent.

According to Nigel Farage, there are, after Carswell, another seven Conservative MPs who have dined with the snowy-haired septuagenarian. Reports of further defections so far have been denied, but enough damage has already been done.

In whispering sweet nothings into the ears of right-wing Tories whose political views are in reality little different from Ukip’s on many issues, Wheeler has been able to indulge another of his great passions – mischief making. Those who have met him talk of his considerable personal charm, but it is of the diffident, almost apologetic, variety. By contrast to his leader, he’s no demagogue. The smoke-filled room is where he does his best work. One City contemporary of Wheeler’s said: “I remember having lunch once with him and his right-hand man Nat Le Roux. It was almost painful. It was difficult getting a word out of him. He’s terribly shy.” But, as the source is quick to stress, there is an exceptionally keen intelligence lurking behind that unassuming manner.

Wheeler is also a shrewd judge of people, an attribute he has put to good use around the green baize of the poker table. He boasts the distinction of having finished in the money at the main event of the annual World Series of Poker in Las Vegas on more than one occasion. Wheeler has put his wealth and success down to “good luck”, but as any poker player will tell you, while this is important, it will get you only so far.

What was a stroke of fortune was the way he came by his privileged upbringing. Stuart Wheeler was adopted as a two-year-old by Alexander Wheeler, a 55-year-old former army officer and heir to a banking fortune, and his young wife Betty, daughter of a baronet, Sir John Gibbons. But again, this wasn’t entirely down to luck. His late adoptive mother had taken along her sister Vera to the Adoption Society in 1937 because her husband was too busy to accompany her. Betty Wheeler told the Daily Mail: “[There was another] very good-looking baby and [we were] considering adopting that one when Vera saw a child standing up making a bit of nuisance of himself and said to my mother, ‘That one might be more interesting in the long run.’” So it proved.

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His adoptive father frittered away much of his fortune, resulting in the family downsizing after his death from leukaemia in 1942. But there was still enough money for Wheeler to be educated at Eton College, and then Oxford. Having earned a degree in law he went on to work as a barrister, before a decidedly unsuccessful career in merchant banking. It was in 1974 that he set out on the road that would make his fortune, and it was gambling that supplied it. Shrewd gamblers know that the house always wins. Wheeler decided to become the house by founding IG Index, initially to allow friends to take a punt on the gold price.

More traditional forms of gambling have, over time, brought Wheeler rich reward. He was once kicked out of a Las Vegas casino for winning too much at blackjack, and at one point bridge provided much of his income. This drew him into the company of the likes of Lord Lucan (the two played together just a couple of days before the latter’s disappearance) and the late Jimmy Goldsmith. He once even played with the actor Omar Sharif and was a regular at the Clermont Club, the Mayfair casino owned by John Aspinall. These were the sort of people with the means to take advantage of the IG Index’s new product. The firm grew steadily at first, until cuts to the top rate of income tax – pushed through by Sir Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher – acted as a catalyst for a change in the firm’s fortunes. They dramatically expanded the number of people who could afford to indulge in the new sport of spread betting.

Lots of money and little experience are, however, a dangerous combination at the best of times. Add in the fact that spread betting can leave punters with potentially unlimited losses – there weren’t the “stop loss” facilities modern firms now like their clients to take out – and it’s a recipe for disaster. When the 1987 stock market crash hit, Wheeler’s clients couldn’t pay up and the firm almost went broke. He was bailed out by Old Etonian pals who saw the potential in the business after he used that diffident charm to persuade them to invest.

The rest is history. IG is now a multinational financial services business, after Wheeler floated it on the stock market. He stopped running the business in 2002, complaining it was “no longer fun” – but not before netting a fortune estimated at up to £100m from his shares, some £5m of which Wheeler donated to the Conservative Party, making him the biggest single political donor in British history.

Married to Tessa Codrington, a society photographer of aristocratic lineage, he has three glamorous daughters, the second of whom, Jacquetta Wheeler, was named “model of the millennium” by The Face magazine in 1999. His eldest, Sarah, works at a London auction house, while his youngest, the politically minded Charlotte, has been something of a gadfly, dabbling in modelling and City public relations, among other things. An LSE graduate, she reportedly wrote essays about why wealthy individuals should not be allowed to make donations to political parties, and even played a role in trying to stave off Wheeler’s departure from the Tory fold – to no avail.

What her reaction was to his claim last year that women were “nowhere near as good as men” at games such as chess, bridge and poker is anyone’s guess.He was at the time arguing against quotas for female directors in the boardroom, but that kind of comment comes dangerously close to the sort of ground that once led an old Etonian of more recent vintage to describe Ukip’s members as “fruitcakes”.

That old Etonian was, of course, Prime Minister David Cameron. Wheeler is now a committed opponent. Too old to join Cameron’s “chumocracy”, he is anyway part of a strand of Conservatism that has been bitterly disappointed with the Prime Minister’s leadership and which is mistrustful of his intentions when it comes to the European project, despite the promise of an in/out referendum.

Wheeler won’t be throwing millions at Ukip or any future plebiscite. The upkeep on his country pile, among other things, has diminished his financial status somewhat, and it’s doubtful that Mr Farage can count on too many more of the six-figure donations that resulted in Wheeler’s expulsion from the Conservative Party.

But the 79-year-old brings many other talents to Ukip’s table. In booting him out, the Tories gave Mr Farage a useful hand to play. And play it he has, with the sort of skill Wheeler admires.