Iain Anderson - F**K Business: The Business of Brexit

I n late June 2018 I was attempting to enjoy a peaceful weekend away from Brexit and the business of lobbying which is my business but instead I awoke to blaring headlines about the latest zesty soundbite from the then Foreign Secretary. He had been reported by the Daily Telegraph as railing against business and its lobbying efforts to secure a good deal with the EU. He was said to have snorted: Fuck business, in an off-the-cuff remark to a diplomat who decided to ring up the papers and decry the comment.

I dont like expletives at the best of times, I dont like using them myself and I especially dont like Cabinet ministers using them to depict their attitude towards business and wealth creators but I felt the title of this book wrote itself! Expletives appear to be the noms du jour they cut through the imagination and serve up headlines in the current age of populism where plaster may fall off the ceiling on to the lexicon of politics. I agonised about putting them on the front cover of this book. But I want them to arrest the senses. Something has gone badly wrong in our discourse.

Those two words summed up the disconnect between our political leaders and our leading businessmen and women, which has been growing for years. It wasnt just the sentiments of our new Prime Minister but an attitude which is widely held.

I waited to hear a retraction or denial from his entourage, but I waited in vain. So, I emailed the chairman of one of the UKs biggest FTSE 100 companies and also one of the leading business trade bodies and said I thought a clear response was needed. They agreed.

I then got in touch with Henry Zeffman at The Times. He asked for a Red Box daily briefing comment as soon as possible. If its punchy enough, it will make a news story, said Henry. I told him: Dont worry it will be.

But the outburst provoked wider thoughts. What had gone wrong in the relationship between business and politics? As someone who is a passionate advocate of the need for policymakers and businesspeople to work together for a common good, I believe we have been living through the worst of times. The financial crisis over a decade ago eroded trust between our politicians and business folk, and events since have only served to make things a lot worse.

Of course, its true that not every business leader opposed Brexit. Far from it. Many have been strong proponents of the idea. In this book I will talk to both sides of the argument. I backed Remain but have been on record many times to say our country needs to move on and make the best of the result of the 2016 referendum. We cant keep going around in circles. Far from being a Remoaner, I have worked constantly in the past three years to try to improve the dialogue between business and politicians.

Since the referendum, most business leaders have become resigned to it and want to break into a new economic and political cycle. They have not signed up to endless referendums. But everyone leaders of both large and small entities, and including myself wanted a positive deal with the EU to secure a transition towards the new world outside the union. When the blog site BrexitCentral launched in September 2016, I was one of its first contributors and found myself compelled to indicate that, while I had backed Remain, I was also a democrat and that we needed to leave the EU in a way that created economic opportunity not damage.

Three years after the referendum, it has been very difficult to review those words today. Opportunities have been lost and the country appears more divided than ever.

As head of the UKs biggest independent lobbying company, Cicero Group, its my job to translate politics for businesspeople, as well as the other way around. It has given me a ringside seat on our politics, sitting alongside many of the most important businesses in our country. Often those businesses are foreign-owned, by people who view our politics from afar while investing billions in jobs and infrastructure in the UK and who need more translation than most. Many of them remain utterly dumbfounded by the disconnect between politics and business.

Recently I spent an entire day with a Swiss national who has become a leading CEO of a major UK business charting the breakdown in relations. He was perplexed by the UK political situation and knew just how tough negotiations with the EU had been for Switzerland in recent times. My history lesson to the Swiss CEO began in the late 1960s, when I was born, when Enoch Powell started his fight against globalising trends with his Rivers of Blood intervention in 1968, which was to poison Tory thinking for years to come. It set in train two clearly distinct schools of thought within the governing Conservative Party: one open to markets and internationalism; the other deeply sceptical of change and global influences.

I will admit that this book has been cathartic for me. Through the maelstrom of events in the past few years it aims to unpack whats gone wrong by analysing the critical events leading up to the Brexit referendum and its aftermath. Unashamedly, it looks at the relationship in particular between the City and our politicians, for it is the City where I have spent most of my time during my career, firstly as a financial journalist and later as lobbyist. The discussions I have had during my career the meetings between finance and politics that I have sat in; the understanding that I gained have all shaped my thinking.

This book also draws on my thirty-five years as a member of the Conservative Party and looks at the relationship between the Tories (which have always been viewed as the natural party of business) and commerce an alliance which became eroded through the thirteen years of Labour government under Blair and Brown.

The book takes us through the coalition to the dry run for Brexit in the Scottish independence poll in 2014 and goes on to look in some depth at the EU referendum and its aftermath, including the travails of the May administration and its wary relations with business. I recall personal stories of friendships on all sides of politics and enterprise, and of the view from my ringside seat with business leaders, the UKs main regulators and the political decision makers and their advisers. It ends just at the time when Boris Johnson the man whose quote gave the book its name has been revealed as the man who will be attempting to steer us through the next stages in the Brexit saga.

I come to the conclusion that so much has been lost in translation between the political class and our wealth creators that many on both sides dont really understand each other any more and perhaps dont want to. However, a new chapter has opened in British politics with a new Prime Minister. I have a genuine hope that things can only get better. Perhaps the relationship with business and politics can be rebooted or, even better, remade.

From a semi-autobiographical perspective, this book offers a peek into the world of business engagement with the political class. It is built upon my direct experiences over the past decade and more, alongside new and exclusive interviews for this book carried out with some of the countrys leading economic and political players as the high drama of the Brexit endgame unfolded in the spring and summer of 2019.

This book is not intended to be an academic tome or a political philosophy textbook but an easily readable account of the period which lifts the lid on the relationship between business and politics right now. It does not attempt to offer a political treatise or make policy conclusions, but I hope to tell the story of how business and politics have grown apart.