John Caudwell: Bezos gives billionaires a bad name
If you ever want to feel like you don’t quite do enough with your time, speak to John Caudwell.
We are approaching the culmination of a wide-ranging interview, and the billionaire founder of Phones 4u – and a man hoping to build London’s most expensive housing development ever – runs through his terrifyingly busy schedule in an unnervingly off-hand manner.
“I’ve just done six weeks driving in the Peking to Paris Rally. I came back, and hit the ground running immediately. This weekend I cycled 95 miles… then I was racing all day yesterday at Donington Park. Then I go to film a lifestyle programme on the yacht and then cycle through France to get to a level to do L’Etape [a gruelling French amateur cycling race] in two weeks,” the 72-year-old says, matter-of-factly. “I find chilling out very stressful.”
Sheepish and self-conscious, your altogether less energetic reporter chooses not to mention just how many hours he spent on the sofa watching Wimbledon last weekend while the man 42 years his senior was pedalling up hills and whirring round a race track.
And those feelings of guilt are only compounded by what he omitted from that list. For over the course of the previous hour, he also mentions that he spent the early hours of that morning in at another interview in the LBC studio; that he is due to give a speech at the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday; that one of his charities has published a paper being launched in the House of Lords that day; and that a fortnight earlier, another charity of his raised over £1m at its annual gala.
‘I dreamt of two things: being wealthy, and being charitable’
It is these last two exploits – and his charitable efforts in general – that have taken City AM to the palatial surroundings of Caudwell’s Mayfair residence, which, at an estimated £250m, is believed to be the most valuable private home in the UK.
“As a seven-year-old I dreamt of two things: being wealthy and being charitable,” he says. “And that was driving round in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce handing five-pound notes out to poor people.”
The serial entrepreneur readily admits it was a “very precocious, weird dream”. But it was, nevertheless, one which he says “shaped [his] destiny”. And as – in the late 1990s – Phones 4u evolved from bootstrapped consumer-tech purveyor to one of the largest mobile phone retailers in Britain – earning Caudwell a considerable fortune in the process – his attention turned to fulfilling the second half of his childhood vision.
He established the Staffordshire-based charity Caudwell Children in 2000, and it has gone on to become one of the UK’s leading third-sector providers of support for children with chronic debilitating conditions. Last month, at its annual ‘Butterfly Ball’, it raised £1.5m in a single night, thanks in part to “amazing” performances from the likes of Sister Sledge and Paloma Faith. Faith, Caudwell says, “even auctioned off her jacket to one of my friends while she was on stage”.
There’s also Caudwell Youth, his newer charity which helps young people at risk of slipping into crime with one-on-one mentoring. A new report it published this week – the topic of his LBC News interview – found for every £1 it spent, it saved the taxpayer at least £6 in future police, justice, and prison costs had his charity not intervened.
But most consequential – both rhetorically and in unvarnished financial terms – is his decision to sign the Giving Pledge. The formal pact – founded by investment guru Warren Buffett, and Bill and Melinda Gates, commits him and – for now – 249 other billionaires to giving away a large portion of their fortune to good causes when they die.
“The pleasure of donating money during your lifetime is amazing,” he says. “To change people’s lives, and to see that you’re doing all that during your lifetime is a phenomenal thing to do. But for those who aren’t at that point, just leave it in your will, and you’re still a billionaire for life.”
‘Bezos is encouraging people to be resentful’
Caudwell is very alive to the fact his rallying cry to the world’s super-rich feels increasingly at odds with the apparent direction of the cultural zeitgeist.
Indeed, at the exact same time his friend was bidding £5,000 for Paloma Faith’s jacket, the world was bearing witness to one of the most extreme displays of individual wealth in human history taking place 800 miles south.
“That wedding [between Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez] was the crystallisation of the super-rich breeding resentment,” he says. “The way they’re living their lives, and their attitude to life, it’s encouraging people to be sceptical. And I get that.”
“In Bezos’s case, he could give 99 per cent of his wealth away… and he would still be leaving £3bn to his kids,” he adds. “And you could say the same thing about Musk.”
Donald Trump and his ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ – soon to become a ‘Big Beautiful Act’ – will, in Caudwell’s eyes, only serve to compound the increasing resentment the average global citizen has for the world’s growing ranks of billionaires and multi-billionaires.
But if tax cuts for super-rich Americans and spending cuts for federal services aren’t the route to prosperity and fairness, what might Caudwell do were he to find himself occupying the White House, or indeed a different, fictitious office with even more power?
“I wish, in a way, that there was a global leader in charge of the world,” he says. “Because it would then be very easy to impose a three per cent wealth tax on every rich person in the world.”
Unbeknownst to him or your reporter, while he was laying out his vision for a global levy on wealth, just half a mile away, officials in Number 10 Downing Street were refusing to rule out the prospect of introducing a domestic wealth tax at the Autumn’s Budget. With the Chancellor looking down the barrel of a £30bn fiscal pickle, the months-long gradual crescendo of calls from her party’s left for a blanket levy on wealth accelerated dramatically over the weekend.
But in the absence of a “global leader”, Caudwell is adamant the levy would not work on a domestic level.
“We have to stay competitive,” he says. “We need to think, ‘Are we keeping wealth in Britain? And is that wealth creating more and more jobs and creating an environment where people think Britain is the country to come to?'”
Labour are ‘making really poor decisions’
Just over a year ago, Caudwell – a longstanding Conservative donor – dealt a major blow to the hopes of Rishi Sunak’s ageing government when he pulled his support for the Tories, and threw his weight behind Labour.
At the time, he branded Sunak an “absolute dud”, and declared the Labour party “the very best for Britain going forward.”
Twelve months on though, and much like the electorate at large, his frustrations with the Conservative party have evolved into a residual feeling that the entire political system offers few good options.
“The Conservatives did a dreadful job over that period, but we’ve now got Labour making really poor decisions”, he says, in a striking change of tone. The changes to the non-dom regime, to inheritance tax carve outs on farms and family businesses, and the absence of any genuine appetite for reform all – in Caudwell’s eyes – mean Labour is failing to keep Britain competitive and create wealth.
But unlike over a fifth of the UK voters – not to mention similarly well-heeled entrepreneurs like Nick Candy and Richard Farleigh – that cynicism has not pushed him into the arms of Reform UK.
“We need some amazing leadership in this country, but Farage doesn’t give it,” he continues. “There are lots of reasons but the largest – for me – is climate change. Ultimately, if we don’t solve climate change, then we don’t need to worry about our living standards, because we are heading headlong into a catastrophic situation.”
With no attractive options on the table, and no apparent appetite – on his part – to slow down any time soon, might he ever consider remedying Britain’s dearth of political leadership by standing for election – or becoming a minister – himself?
He certainly has no shortage of ideas. Throughout our interview, he talks of cutting state spending by one per cent across the board – “it would save £12bn” – and of slapping much more punitive taxes on ‘sin’ products like online gambling, tobacco, alcohol and petrol. He even floats the politically dicey notion of drastically cutting the taxes of super-rich individuals like him who sign the Giving Pledge.
But those grand, radical ideas notwithstanding there will be no Caudwell venture into the political fray.
“I really wish that I wanted to go into politics, and wish that I wanted to be Prime Minister,” he says, “because I could make a good job of it.”
If no move into elected politics is forthcoming, how does Caudwell plan to while away the latter stages of a remarkable career? Any plans afoot to recline into a genteel retirement aboard his Monaco-based yacht?
“I can’t think of anything worse than having to lie on a deck chair for two hours,” he answers.
“That would kill me.”