On Tuesday, 28 March 2000, The Scottish Daily Mail’s headlines spelt out a new stage in the campaign to prevent the repeal of Section 28 in Scotland: “LET’S PUT IT TO THE VOTE… £1m private cash for Scottish referendum over Section 28… 23 co-sponsors helping pay for the ballot”. (The Daily Record reported 22). According to The Record, the costs - £950,000 before VAT - were to be split between the backers with Souter underwriting the total. ‘Keep the Clause’ deputy, Jack Cassidy refused to answer the pro-repeal Sunday Herald when they asked what brought this particular business group together and exactly how many were clients of Jack Irvine’s Media House. He dismissed their questions as “irrelevant”. Many of those putting their names forward as sponsors of the ‘referendum’ were part of the Entrepreneur Exchange network, and at least four; winners of a top entrepreneur award sponsored by The Herald.
Brian Souter, of course, headed the list. He and his wife Betty were both members of the evangelical Church of the Nazarene based in Kansas, USA. As boss of Stagecoach, his personal wealth, pitched at the start of 2000 at over £565m, made him Scotland’s richest man. His spokesman explained: “His interests are his family, which he puts above everything else, Stagecoach, which is his baby, and Clause 28, his private belief”.
Also down as a sponsor was Brian Souter’s 57-year-old sister Ann Gloag, Scotland’s richest woman - at her height; richer than the Queen - with a personal fortune that was estimated at the time to have been more than £100m and an annual dividend payout of £4m. Leaving Perth High School without a single O-grade, she owned the £2m Beaufort Castle in Invernesshire (for which it was once reported she paid an annual council tax fee of £1,878) and a yellow Bentley with the number plate: 1 ANN. Ann Gloag’s son Jonathan had tried to work in his mother’s business but things didn’t work out and he left to become a chef. He owned a £450,000 mansion on a hill overlooking Perth bought by his mother and had what The Scottish Mail typically described as “a loving and pretty wife and three small sons”. He was married to his step-sister, Sarah, the daughter of his mother’s second husband, David McCleary. Jonathan was described as a devout, sensitive boy and supported his mother in her divorce with her husband Robin Gloag. Jonathan even went on to set up a bus company of his own before joining forces with Brian Souter to drive rival bus company, Highwayman, owned by Robin Gloag off the road. Jonathan stood to inherit the Stagecoach empire, but, on the night of 18 September 1999, at 28, Gloag’s son walked a few miles towards his mother’s home before taking his own life. He was found hanging from a tree. His father Robin Gloag’s name wasn’t mentioned at Jonathan’s funeral. Ann and Brian’s elder brother, the Rev David Souter, conducted the service. By 2007 there was another tragic accident when Jonathan’s father Robin’s silver Renault Laguna left the road near Perth and crashed into a field. His overturned car was spotted near a farm by a passing motorist. He was killed. Further tragedy struck in 2009 when Ann Gloag’s 24-year-old son, Peter, was involved in a car crash. He was 10 and living in Kenya before being adopted and brought to Scotland for his education. The accident put him in intensive care and left him paralysed.
Amongst Souter’s ‘referendum’ sponsors was another of Jack Irvine’s clients: Thomas Blane Hunter, who also went on to earn the title of Scotland’s richest man, estimated at the time to be worth around £400m. Only four weeks previously, Tom Hunter had been favourably featured in a profile in The Scottish Daily Mail and a report in The Record after his £5m donation to Strathclyde University to set up the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship. In a similar profile in another ‘Keep the Clause’-friendly paper, Scotland on Sunday, Hunter claimed: “When you have as much as I have, making another million isn’t going to make a difference”. Tom Hunter sold his Sports Division business to JJB Sports for £290m. He drove a blue, tinted windowed Bentley marked 2 TBH. His stake in Internet retailer Toyzone was valued at around £80m and his 20 per cent stake in the Reality Group, net him a further £7m in May 2000 when the company was sold to Great Universal Stores.
Married for over 30 years with two children, a scurrilous report appearing in The Scottish News of the World undermined any moral posturing when it alleged he had been caught in Room 3 of a £35-a-night motel on the M6 with fellow executive Mary Rigby. “They indulge their lust then talk about price of steak pies”, the paper exclaimed rather piously. The tabloid suggested Mary booked the room under the false name of ‘Mrs Barnes’. “But as many travellers will know, the dividing walls between rooms and the motel are not that thick, so the guest in Room 2 last Tuesday could hear everything going on next door. ‘The headboard was banging against the wall,’ said the guest”.
Alf Young, a respected business writer and a personal friend of many of the sponsors of the referendum wrote in The Herald: “Tom Hunter, says it doesn’t really matter whether he thinks Section 28 should be repealed or not. ‘This issue is now one of democracy’. Come off it, Tom. You believe there is a genuine majority in Scotland for keeping Section 2a. I suspect there is an even more decisive majority in favour of higher taxes on the very wealthy, like you… Were that cause to be given the same PR welly Brian Souter and Keep the Clause have given Section 28, Tom, polls would soon be telling us a decisive majority of Scottish voters want you and I to pay higher taxes. Would you, Brian and all the other sponsors be willing to bankroll a referendum on that issue in the name of democracy? I think I know the answer to that one”.
Along with Brian Souter, Hunter’s personal fortunes grew by around £3m in August 2000 when Edinburgh-based Orbital Software, a company producing Internet search engine software packages, confirmed a £70m stock market flotation. He has also invested £1m in Corporate Jets, based at the once Stagecoach-owned Prestwick Airport. His Lear jets were hired for around £1,600 an hour. By the summer of 2001, with Hunter’s growing appetite for commercial acquisitions, and after forming a private equity fund, West Coast Capital, he was involved in a joint venture with property tycoon Nick Leslau’s Prestbury Investment Holdings for the acquisition of £166m of real estate which included Babcock Park Industrial estate in Glasgow, a 1.7m square foot estate next to Glasgow International Airport, shops and offices in Kensington in London and a business park by the M4 near Maidenhead. West Coast Capital was the principal investment vehicle for the £260m he made selling Sports Division. He was, however; soon back on the high street with his new clothing chain, d2. For his 40th birthday in 2001, his wife Marion booked pop stars Stevie Wonder and Kool and the Gang for a private concert and fancy-dress party outside Monaco. Guests Brian Souter, dressed as Zorro and his sister Ann Gloag as Queen Victoria joined Virgin chief Richard Branson, Scots racing legend Jackie Stewart, TV star Jonathan Ross and many of Tom Hunter’s closest friends drinking bottles of £400 chilled Chrystal champagne from a bar carved from solid ice depicting famous Hollywood stars. In 2002 he was ready to pull off his biggest deal since selling Sports Division in 1998 by leading a £168m buy-out of Granchester Holdings, which owned a series of retail parks across Britain. West Coast Capital teamed up again with the Bank of Scotland for the deal leaving it with significant stakes in property portfolios worth around £800m. By 2002, Hunter was trying to buy House of Fraser for £197m, waving a guarantee of payment from the Bank of Scotland, now part of HBOS after its merger with the Halifax Building Society, to persuade the company he had the money as well as bidding for a £700m retail portfolio. The Chartwell retail portfolio comprised of 15 retail parks and five development sites. Hunter later unveiled another £200m deal, as HBOS confirmed it was a prolific and solid investment partner for Tom Hunter. In 2003, Hunter scooped £8m after paying £10m for 4.56m shares in the Selfridges stores group before making an offer to buy them out. Unfortunately for Hunter, Canadian billionaire Galen Weston made a higher bid, but after selling his stock for £18m, Hunter was on top again. He went on to make major investments in higher education and would eventually join forces with the Executive to fund £1.8m of research looking at the way primary school teachers were educated. HBOS, through its joint venture team, headed by Peter Cummings, joined forces with Hunter’s West Coast Capital to capture Wyevale Garden Centres in 2006 and made further deals in commercial property including an approach to housebuilders Crest Nicholson with a £659m bid, but this was rejected. Under the name ‘Mother Bidco’, West Coast Capital and HBOS also teamed up with billionaire property moguls, the Reuben brothers to buy Britain’s largest retirement home developer, McCarthy & Stone for £1.1billion. Although the bank’s first deal with Hunter was in 2001, the relationship went back much further to the 90s when Peter Cummings first started working closely with Hunter and his sports business. In 2006, HBOS’s joint venture team had secured 20 property deals worth £2.4bn of debt and equity, selling most of the debt to other lenders whilst keeping the attractive equity stakes.
Another successful entrepreneur that came forward to sponsor Souter’s poll was Sir Tom Farmer, a devout Catholic, a personal friend of Cardinal Winning and a papal knight of St Gregory the Great. He was a former chairman of Scotland Against Drugs when David Macauley had fronted it. (Macauley later resigned before fronting ‘Keep the Clause’ for Jack Irvine and Brian Souter). Sir Tom Farmer established motor repair firm Kwik-Fit in 1971 and sold it to Ford in 1999 for £1billion and made £77m on the sale. He also ploughed £6m into Hibernian football club where Jack Irvine had worked briefly as PR. Although still owning many of the bases from which KwikFit operated, he amassed further property developments including Norfolk-based Morston Assets, which planned a £150m development in Linlithgow and by 2002, Farmer was seeking further planning permission from Falkirk council for a £150m enterprise on a vast 125-acre space owned by Morston Assets outside Falkirk. Farmer also made a substantial financial contribution to the SNP, donating £100,000 in the run-up to the 2007 election. Farmer told reporters he had done it to ensure “a more level playing field”.
A less entrepreneurial figure amongst Souter’s sponsors was the convener of the Church of Scotland’s so-called Board of Responsibility, Anne Allen. Her soft, almost blurred, Hollywood-like, tilted portrait, frequently used in the Scottish press, concealed her evangelical zeal. Mrs Allen’s views on homosexuality were already well-known within the Kirk and when Edinburgh council carried out a survey of homophobia Mrs Allen reportedly begged to know why people who were disgusted at the activities of homosexuals weren’t also surveyed.
Jim Sillars, former MP for Glasgow Govan and deputy leader of the SNP also sponsored Souter’s poll. He was a regular columnist in The Scottish Sun. His homophobic credentials were on show when he used his column to accuse gays of needing an age of consent as low as possible to keep a “stock of homosexual young males… to ensure a continuous supply of sexual partners. …Sex objects, to be used”.
Another entrepreneurial sponsor was Gerald Weisfeld, connected to Tom Hunter through the retail trade, he had helped his wife Vera build up the ‘What Everyone Wants’ discount chain before selling it for £50m. His wife, born Vera Carlin was brought up on a tough Coatbridge housing scheme started work in C & A before learning enough about the retail business to develop the stores with her husband. They sold up in 1990, and eight years later Vera was awarded an OBE. With plans to set up a base for their Weisfeld Foundation Charity, the couple, who already had homes in Australia and Stratford-Upon-Avon paid £1.7m for Torr Hall in the Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire, which boasted its own lake, a helicopter landing pad, tennis courts, stables, ballroom, eight bedrooms, staff flat, coach house cottage and 50 acres of land. The mansion was designed by James Souter of Aberdeen in 1903. The Weisfeld Foundation donated around £1m a year to such charities as the Moira Anderson Foundation, Women’s Aid, a home in Romania for people with HIV and the Mercy ships. In a departure from protocol, Princess Anne once accepted a private invitation to dine with Tom Hunter and the Weisfelds and even stayed overnight in Hunter’s house in the south of France.
Another wealthy sponsor was David Moulsdale, millionaire chairman of DCM Holdings and owner of Optical Express, the fifth largest chain of opticians in Britain; Health Clinic; Specialeyes and Co-Op Eyecare in the UK. He was a close friend of Tom Hunter. Jack Irvine’s Media House also worked for Optical Express. In 2002, they beat off stiff competition from Boots and Specsavers to acquire the Health Clinic for £10m cash from administrators. The deal was part funded through shareholder funds with the rest coming in the form of a debt package from the Bank of Scotland. In an effort to use the Netherlands as a testing ground for rapid expansion into Europe, Mousdale bought two eye laser clinics from Free Vision Euro Eyes, one in Amsterdam and the other in The Hague.
Other wealthy sponsors included Pat and Alex Grant. They had both set up Norfrost in Caithness on a shoestring budget in 1972. They owned one of the largest refrigeration businesses in the world and were understood to be one of the UK’s only manufacturers of chest freezers. Manufacturing white goods under the Norfrost and Aura brands, their customers included retail chain Dixons, Mars confectioners and Coca Cola. Although the couple had no children of their own, Pat’s son by a former marriage, Clay was an occasional member of the International Church of Christ and evoked criticism when he attempted to post homophobic posters up in Edinburgh. Although no stranger to gay sex himself, he claimed to have been “tormented by guilt” and had tried to take his own life. Pat Grant was a close friend of Souter’s sister Ann Gloag through the Scottish Business Trust.
Another sponsor was Hugh Adam, a trustee of the ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign and a former director of Rangers Football Club. Adam also ran the Rangers Pool Division. After spouting the almost obligatory: ‘I’m not homophobic, but…’ precursor in The Scottish Sun, he revealed that: “My difficulty is that I cannot persuade myself that homosexuality is other than an abnormality. That does not mean, of course, that its practitioners are diminished in any way as human beings. I know that there are many people with the same views as myself but decline to speak out for fear of being branded politically incorrect. I urge them to come out”.
John Cameron, a Fife landowner and farmer who was chairman of the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland also came forward as a sponsor of Souter’s poll. He was also railway advisor to Brian Souter’s Stagecoach and director of South West Trains. South West Trains became embroiled in a court battle when they refused to grant the partner of a lesbian subsidised travel in the same way they offered subsidised travel for partners of heterosexuals and, in a separate case, was fined £4 million by the Strategic Rail Authority for offering unreliable services.
Another wealthy sponsor was Donald Macdonald, a crofter’s son from the Isle of Harris who had worked his way to the top at Stakis Hotels before establishing a chain of hotels of his own: Bathgate-based Macdonald Hotels. In June 2000, they announced a £100m joint venture with the Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland to build 10 upmarket city centre hotels. Macdonald Hotels announced an eight per cent increase in underlying pre-tax profits to £13.8m in 1999 and won the Scottish Enterprise top Elite award after notching up an 18% rise in operating profits. They were voted ‘Scotland’s fastest-growing company’ two years in a row while pre-tax profits rose 15% to £7m in 2000. The group boasted an annual turnover of £40.6m. With 26 owned and 53 managed hotels, Macdonald Hotels became engaged in a joint venture with Sheffield University for a 110-bedroom hotel as well as a number of other ambitious hotel projects. Asked if the company was vulnerable to takeover Macdonald was reported saying the board owned more than 30 per cent with probably another 20 per cent or 30 per cent in “very friendly hands”. Those friendly hands included Scottish company Standard Life, Scottish Equitable, Scottish Mutual and Edinburgh Fund Managers. By 2001, together with the Bank of Scotland in a fifty-fifty joint venture, they purchased 48 upmarket, country Heritage Hotels from Compass in a deal worth around £235m and gained full control of its Barratt Resorts’ timeshare for £8.5m. In 2007 Donald Macdonald gave the SNP £30,000. Once the SNP were in power, Macdonald’s planning application for his resort in Aviemore was speeded up to prevent the collapse of the project and save 300 jobs.
George Russell, the chief executive of Scotland The Brand, a company promoting Scottish products overseas, became a sponsor after being approached by Brian Souter with whom he had long-standing personal and church connections. George Russell told The Sunday Herald: “I’m not in the same church, but we follow the same Saviour”. Scotland The Brand was established in 1994 as a division of Scottish Enterprise. It was semi-privatised in 2003 with Scottish Enterprise ceasing subsidies but retaining a director with enhanced voting rights. In 2004, members of Scotland the Brand voted to wind up the organisation before Scottish Enterprise took over the management of the Scotland the Brand mark for members and licensees. The Scottish Executive was criticised by chairman Nick Kuenssberg for undermining their success.
Bill Hughes, once the Treasurer and Deputy Chairman of the Scottish Conservative Party, a key figure in the Scottish division of the CBI and an elder in the Church of Scotland also stepped forward as a sponsor. He was also an architect of Scottish Enterprise as well as a chairman of Grampian Holdings, a company Jack Irvine also did PR work for. The Scottish Daily Mail, proclaiming itself “the favourite newspaper of Britain’s leading businessmen” claimed: “It was his Christian duty to support moves to retain Section 28”. Hughes explained: “As a Christian, I believe in the sanctity of marriage and that the traditional family unit is critically important. It is the ideal state of affairs in which to propagate a child. This stance is strongly taken by our minister, Alistair Horne, and the membership of the church are totally behind him”.
David McLetchie, leader of the Scottish Conservatives and MSP for Lothian was also a sponsor. The Scottish Conservative Party had their Holyrood campaign bankrolled by the reclusive Monaco-based Irvine Laidlaw. Although not on the list of Souter’s sponsors, Laidlaw became Scotland’s second richest man in 2006 with a personal fortune estimated at £730m. He had business interests in Paris and Hong Kong and owned the Institute for International Research, the world’s largest conference organiser. Laidlaw donated £2m to an Academy in Newcastle and wanted to donate cash to Scottish schools using the City Academy model introduced by Tony Blair, but this was rejected by Scottish ministers.
Other sponsors of Souter’s poll were Sir David McNee, formerly Chief Constable of Strathclyde Police and Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1977 to 1983 when Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and Fergus Ewing, a staunch Catholic SNP MSP for Inverness East, Nairn and Lochaber and deputy shadow minister for tourism, small businesses and the Highlands and Islands. Also amongst the sponsors was Lord MacKay of Clashfern, a retired former Lord Chancellor from 1987 – 97 and member of Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet. On later legislation, The Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2006, which sparked a process ending discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in the provision of goods, facilities and services, he wrote in The Daily Telegraph, saying: “If, as I believe, the regulations are intended to make it unlawful to refuse to facilitate homosexual acts, then it is obvious that those who practice a faith that considers homosexual activity to be sinful are being subjected to a law that seeks to over-ride their consciences”. While the impending legislation was being prepared, MacKay insisted: “It follows that such a person (a religionist) will not wish to undertake any activity that involves participating in or facilitating the carrying out of practices by others which he considers sinful for himself”.
Other sponsors included Andrew Welsh, a chairman of the powerful audit committee of the Scottish parliament and lay preacher, Neil Hood, Professor of Business Policy, director of Strathclyde University’s International Business Unit, advisor to Scottish Enterprise and a non-executive director of Kwik-Fit (whose former chairman was Tom Farmer) and Grampian Holdings (whose former chairman was Bill Hughes). They were joined by Vali Hussein, vice-principal of the Islamic Academy of Scotland who promoted research in Islamic Jerusalem. Hussein told The Scottish Daily Mail how his deep religious convictions led him to take a stand. “I firmly believe the promotion of homosexual acts is completely immoral and is a terrible thing to teach innocent children in schools. I do not want such things in schools. We respect family values and want children to grow up in a normal environment and not be brainwashed into thinking something abnormal is normal”.
The Scottish Daily Mail assured: “There is not a fanatic, a crank or a so-called ‘homophobe’ among them”. The Record crowed: “This time, Souter doesn’t stand alone. He had put together an impressive bunch of backers from every walk of Scottish society who share his rage at the Government’s arrogant refusal to listen to public opinion over gay sex lessons in schools. Along with church leaders, they include academics…”
garry@garryotton.com
Next part 29 – The Gay Mafia and Souter’s Glorified Poll
