James Dyson: From Brexit to Singapore how a ‘made in Britain’ tycoon abandoned his country

Sir James Dyson is a remarkable man. At a youthful 73, he is the richest person in Britain, with a net worth of about £16bn. For purposes of scale, Bill Gates is worth about 10 times as much, but that’s still not bad for the son of a public schoolmaster in Norfolk with no great wealth behind him. His name is now synonymous with easier vacuum cleaning, and instantly recognisable, like Hoover and a by-word for British innovation.

When the pandemic struck and the government , the led by Boris Johnson, realised it didn’t have enough ventilators to cope with the caseload, it panicked. As the general “go to”, “can do” British engineer and designer, Dyson was asked to help and he readily agreed.

He’d been in touch with the authorities about making a new design of ventilator, using Dyson’s existing technologies and component supply chains, and in partnership with JCB and Cambridge science engineers TTP, another British success story sympathetic to Boris Johnson. However, the project ran into the early problem of what would happen if Dyson and his team stayed in the UK for longer than they had planned, away from the company’s operations in Singapore and Malaysia.

If they did so, they would become liable for (higher) UK taxation. With bureaucratic resolution moving slowly, Dyson appealed directly to the then prime minister. As “first lord of the Treasury”, as Johnson declared, he would “fix it”. In due course, the then chancellor, Rishi Sunak, suspended the usual residency rules. We then learned No 10 and Treasury officials may not have been aware of the details of the lobbying exercise, even though there may have been nothing wrong with it, and Boris Johnson insisted at the time that he was just trying to move heaven and earth to get his hands on those ventilators – an effort he once referred to, in poor taste, as “Operation Last Gasp”.

There are two ways of looking at this. Dyson, you could argue, was under no obligation to divert his company’s resources and spend his own money to unknown financial ends, and was asking for some leeway in an emergency. Or he was being greedy, offensively so, as a Brexit-supporting offshore billionaire already sheltered (perfectly legally) from the attentions of HMRC. As a fellow campaigner for withdrawal from the EU, and a lifelong Conservative, Dyson was assumed to be a Johnson “crony”, though his credentials as an industrialist cannot be doubted.

As it turned out, the lengthy process of winning approval from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the passing of the peak below the worst predictions meant that the Dyson CoVent ventilator never went into production, and the “tax fix” promised by Johnson and delivered by Sunak wasn’t used, at least by Dyson and the Dysonites.

Even though the work was done in 30 days, it came to nought. Dyson reflected at the time that “the team grew quickly, and ultimately about 450 people were involved, working across the UK and Singapore so that we could achieve 24-hour working cycles and draw on our global supply chains and knowledge. Our Singapore engineering team picked up while the UK team was sleeping and vice versa – but the days were still long, often stretching long into the night.”

In the end, Dyson put £20m into the project, with no funding requested from the British taxpayer. Peanuts, really, considering his worth, and the £500m he wrote off when he canned his electric car project, but a gesture of patriotism all the same, in an era when rich “globalist” bankers and businesses, such as those running/ruining football are despised more than ever.

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While Dyson’s corporate HQ, remains in Singapore – his main home is still Dodington Park, a 300-acre Georgian estate in Gloucestershire, apparently large enough to fit 18,000 normal sized homes into. There’s also a chateau in France and a townhouse in Chelsea. The 300-foot yacht Nahlin is more of a floating pad. He sold his $50m penthouse in Singapore a few years ago, at a loss as it happens: you win some, you lose some.

Dyson and his wife Deidre (nee Hindmarsh) were married in 1968, and they have three grown-up children they’ll now be nearer to, all with entrepreneurial instincts. The oldest child, Emily, runs a boutique, Couverture, in Chelsea; Jake designs and sells wall-and-floor lighting; and Sam owns and runs a recording studio and is lead guitarist with The Chemists (whose music features in Sky Sports coverage of rugby and football). All have benefited from a £15m gift from their father, presumably for the purposes of tax planning, and from having a good start in life, in some ways better than that of Sir James.

Dyson certainly puts some of his energy and determination down to the experience, aged 9, of losing his father, Alec, a classics teacher at Gresham’s School in Holt, to lung and throat cancer: “Not having a father, particularly at that time, was very unusual. I felt different. I was on my own. I can’t quite explain it, but I think subconsciously I felt a need to prove myself. Something like 80 per cent of British prime ministers since Walpole have lost a parent before the age of 10. So there’s something in it. I’m certainly quite driven.” He also told an interviewer that his time at boarding school was fairly “harsh” and: “‘Feelings’ is a word I didn’t know until I was about 50.” He learned perseverance from long-distance running.

He loved art, and followed his passion to the Byam Shaw School of Art followed by the Royal College of Art in the 1960s, where he became intrigued by design and then engineering. Apparently he was initially inspired by the eccentric US designer and architect R Buckminster Fuller, who invented the geodesic dome; later on it was Akio Morita, pioneering founder of Sony and father of the Walkman.

While at college, Dyson found a mentor in Jeremy Fry, scion of the Fry’s chocolate dynasty and owner of an industrial design company. Fry was a bit of a libertine, and besties with Anthony Armstrong-Jones, and was due to be best man at the wedding of Armstrong-Jones to Princess Margaret, the sister of the Queen, in 1960, before his sexual adventures came to the attention of the palace and he was vetoed.

As free in his thinking as in the bedroom, it was the well-connected and wealthy Fry who gave Dyson his first commission – to design the “Sea Truck”, a kind of mini-landing craft. It was a minor example of the “white heat” boom in British technological innovation in the 1960s, symbolised by the revolutionary original Mini, the hovercraft, Concord and the Hawker Harrier jump jet. Dyson made the Sea Truck work, and was given the job of then selling it by using his intimate knowledge of every component and his obvious love for the product, Steve Jobs-style.

By 1972, Dyson was flogging his peculiar craft to everyone from the Egyptian navy to a chap smuggling American cigarettes into Italy. Now, as then, he still has a lunch sort of vibe about him. He told The New York Times: “I didn’t look like a businessman or anything. I had flowing trousers, long hair, flowered shirts. But I set up the company and the manufacturing, and I sold them for five years.

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“The point is, here’s this long-haired art student ... getting asked to design something he knew nothing about. Then he’s told to set up a company, which he knew nothing about. That’s what I do today with my people. I try to recruit everybody as a graduate, because they have no baggage, they have enthusiasm, and curiosity.” It was the kind of spirit that Johnson and Dominic Cummings were trying to inculcate during their brief partnership in Downing Street, and before Cummings was accused by his old boss of leaking the text conversations with Dyson.

After Sea Truck came the ballbarrow, a more manoeuvrable wheelbarrow with a ball instead of a wheel, naturally featured on Tomorrow’s World. Then came his first tangle with the home Hoover, which he came to hate so much that he removed its bag apparatus and substituted a cardboard cone. Observing how cyclone machines remove dust and detritus in saw mills and cement works, he tried to miniaturise the process. Somehow he got about £2m – much more in today’s prices – from the bank to fund his activities: “I think the bank got a bit deeper in than they intended to, but I had an interesting bank manager. I asked him why he lent me the money, and he said ‘I went home to my wife and said, ‘What do you think about vacuum bags and vacuum cleaners and she said ‘Dreadful, dreadful.’”

He built 5,127 vacuum cleaner prototypes before he got it right, and started by selling his 1983 G-Force model through mail order and catalogues. He found great success in tech-friendly Japan, and some sales in the US before he founded Dyson Ltd in 1991 and started making and selling them himself – “Say goodbye to the bag.” It made his fame and fortune, and a lot of householders much happier. The techniques and basic elements have since been applied, with varying success, to make Dyson washing machines, fans, cordless vacuum cleaners, robot vacuum cleaners, hairdryers, hair tongs and that electric car, powered via solid-state batteries and with a range of 600 miles, but utterly unviable commercially. His current efforts are focused on home robotics, making houses healthier, AI and non-domestic applications.

Dyson will always be remembered for his vacuum cleaners, but for many it was his role in Brexit for which he will always be resented. Some detect a strong streak of commercial self-interest in his no-doubt-sincere belief in sovereignty and that Britain can do things better, in the Dyson way, and more nimbly on its own, as the vaccines saga arguably proved. In the late 1990s, though, Dyson was campaigning for the UK to join the euro, the ultimate loss of economic control. Yet in those days he was manufacturing and employing people in the UK, and the EU’s single market was very important to the business. Dyson was an icon of a British manufacturing success.

A few years later, pleading problems getting planning permission to expand in Wiltshire, as well as high wages and the strength of the pound, production was shifted to low-cost Malaysia, much closer to growth markets in east Asia. In due course, after the Brexit vote, Dyson HQ was shifted to Singapore, which Remainers and Leavers alike found hypocritical and a betrayal.

It was true that a major research and design operation was retained in the UK, and that Dyson’s enlightened philanthropy at Cambridge University and elsewhere are still important concerns but, rather like those old vacuum cleaners and their bags, the power of his personal brand seems less powerful than it was.

The news this week that Dyson is axeing up to 1,000 jobs in the UK, reducing its UK-based workforce by more than a quarter, is unlikely to help with this. In a statement, Dyson chief executive Hanno Kirner said the job losses were a result of the company reviewing its global structures and preparing for the future.

Had his ventilators become as ubiquitous in intensive care wards as his vacuum cleaners are in homes, he might now be a universally loved national treasure. But, now as we are left to navigate the chaos of his beloved Brexit while Mr Dyson moves his businesses further out of the UK, the rest of us are left to suck it up.