The Billionaire Who Loves Paying Tax: Peter Cruddas

The world is full of talented poor people. Don't be one of them. What should be my biggest success? My marriage, I would think, two great kids. I'm in the House of Lords, I'm an entrepreneur, I've made a huge amount of money. I left school at 15, no qualifications, my dad was an alcoholic, my whole life's a success if you think about it.

Well first of all, great to meet you Rob, and thank you for doing this interview with me. I haven't done many podcasts in my time, I didn't realize people even wanted to do a podcast, so thank you. Well, I've got an interesting story to tell. To answer your question, the world is changing quite dramatically. The way money is moved around the world is done differently. We don't have checkbooks anymore, money's moved electronically. When they bring in blockchain – and I'm not an expert on this – but when blockchain comes in through stock exchanges, banking, etc., you will be able to buy and sell things real time, and money will leave your account real time and go to the other person real time. More or less you can do that now with online internet banking. But in the future, if you want to buy shares in Facebook or Tesla, now you click and it takes two or three days to clear. With blockchain you get instant settlement. So it's really a wider way of financial products moving around the world. I've just come back from holiday in Spain, and I know you can do everything on your card, but I've got a prepaid travel card where I just put $5,000 on it. I do that because I don't want all these entries going over my main bank account. So the world's changing, it's going digital in terms of financing. We can talk about cryptocurrencies as well – I don't think they're related, but people like to think that they are. I've got a view on that we can discuss. It's just the way money moves around the world now. You can purchase property by making an electronic payment to your lawyer, they can authenticate you electronically, they can get access to Experian-type checking. The world's changing. I've been banking online for about 10, 15, 20 years, I do everything online, it's fantastic.

Well look, the process of buying and selling property is not really about getting the money moving around; it's all the searches and legal stuff. It reminds me of the NHS, where you have medical records electronically. A few years ago they were trying to download everybody's medical records – centralize everything. It's possible nowadays if somebody wants to do it. Maybe there's a process going on where you can have all the information regarding a property electronically stored securely, and then if you want to buy the property, there's nothing to stop you doing it in real time. You touched on digital currency. There are two types of digital currencies: cryptos – which I don't call digital currency – and then there's talk about creating a central bank digital currency, where there's no more cash. I think cash is going to disappear; we don't need it anymore. That's great for government because they can see where every penny goes. Great for tracking criminal activity. I was at a function a year or so ago and I saw Rishi Sunak, who was the chancellor at the time. I said, 'Rishi, do you realize if you get a central bank digital currency you can collect VAT in real time?' Just imagine going to a restaurant, swiping your card, paying £100 for a meal – you know you spend a lot more than that – and every time VAT is charged, bang goes through to the government. Fuel duty too. Every time you put fuel in your car or charge your electric car, the government part could be collected real time. That would transform and stop tax fraud. I don't know where we are now because there's a lot going on, but they talked about going carbon neutral by 2030, all new cars will be electric. If people aren't buying fuel, how does the government make up that shortfall? They could charge for charging, but that wouldn't be much. So you could charge them electronically using a digital currency to move from A to B. If you drove from A to B, you could collect congestion charging electronically, charge per mile, even fractional payments. That's where digital currencies come in. China already has a central bank digital currency, and the US is working on it. We looked at it in the House of Lords; something came through and the Lords decided it wasn't the right time. If I had been on that committee, I would have had a different view.

No, I don't. As far as I'm concerned, it's inevitable. Slightly gets me onto cryptocurrencies. I'm not an expert on cryptocurrencies. My wife said to me once, 'What's a cryptocurrency?' I said it's a bit like going onto the internet and playing a game, and you get rewards in tokens, and those tokens you can move around and give to other people. I can't really see governments ever adopting cryptocurrency as its fiat currency because governments need to control money supply and interest rates. You just can't run an economy if somebody else is printing your cash for you. There are lots of diverse views on cryptocurrencies; I don't think they can ever be mainstream. You will get suppliers saying you can buy my car with cryptocurrency, but the problem is the value of cryptocurrencies can go up and down. If you valued a car at one Bitcoin, by the time you receive the Bitcoin, the value could have gone down 10-20%. It's too volatile. I'm sure there are a lot of people who own some cryptocurrency, but basically, if it's not an investment product because it's not underpinned by anything, it's a gamble. If you go into cryptocurrencies and look at it as a gamble, that's the right attitude. Don't remortgage your house to buy cryptos. It's gone from $40,000 down to $20,000, peaked at $68,000. It started at zero, couldn't even buy a pizza with it. A couple of guys here got into cryptos when they were $100 a pop and they're still laughing. I said, 'What are you going to do with those cryptos?' They said, 'We're just going to hang on to them.' Maybe they're right. I don't know. But this is the new world we're in now. When I started this company, we allow clients to buy and sell financial products – shares, foreign currencies. The breakthrough for me was twofold: I invented online trading, I had the first platform in Europe to buy and sell online. I had Steven Hargreaves-Landsdown on the show – they're more on the pensions and investing side, we're more on the trading side. People tend to separate their wealth into pots: property, bank account cash, disposable income, and investments. They might have an account with Hargreaves-Landsdown to look after their pension, but they also want to trade a bit of Facebook, have a bit of leverage, do Tesla, Bitcoin, buy gold, oil – they come to us for that. I created CMC Markets. If they read my book, 'Passport to Success,' it talks about the history of CMC and how it started. My breakthrough was twofold and explains my journey from a humble Telex operator at Western Union. I left school at 15 – I'm not as young as I look, born in '53 – started in 1969 at Western Union. What I saw there was networking. We never had screens back then, just a keyboard with telex tape. When you typed a message, the ticker tape would go from the teleprinter to the other side of the world. I equate that to the cinema – collective viewing – while the internet was the invention of television, where you could have that film in your front room. I understood the power of networking. I knew the internet would connect people, and that was back in '94. We had the first web page in Britain, we certainly sent one of the first emails. The other breakthrough was being able to create a contract for difference. A CFD is a settlement term; it's not a product. If you trade Facebook at $180 a share, you can trade it as physical, as an ETF, or as a CFD. CFDs allow you to borrow money and leverage up, buy bigger quantities for a smaller deposit. The stars lined up when we launched our internet service and added a generic financial product, the CFD. That meant you could trade anything around the world from one account. Prior to that, you needed a stock broker account, bank account, futures account, etc. That was the explosion of this company. With the invention of the internet, it's now possible for a taxi driver to pull over, get his mobile phone, trade 10,000 different financial products, and get the same price as Goldman Sachs. The transparency has driven down to rock bottom the cost of executing financial trades. We've expanded that industry. I've been working at CMC for 33 years, started it in '89, long before you were born.

Yes, dollars. I would say so, yes.

It's a question I get asked a lot. When I was 15, 16, 18, did I want to be rich? Yes, of course. Did I want to drive a 1600E Cortina, which was the dog's bollocks back then? Yes, I did. The best car I ever saw was an E-Type Jag, but I always wanted to own a white Triumph Stag and never did. But the thing is, in the early days I had two offers to sell this company. The first was for a couple of million when we were one year old, and I thought, 'Blimey, that's a good offer,' but I wasn't interested. My dad was an alcoholic – drank 25 pints of Guinness and a bottle of rum a day. How was my relationship with my dad? Not good. He was hitting my mom, and I laid him out when I was 17. He never touched her again. I broke his nose, smacked him out, he had to go to hospital. It was pent up. I'd always done well in the city, always worked hard. When I started the company, I didn't do it from the back bedroom; I'd worked up until I was about 35, had good bonuses. I've never done drugs. My dad's drinking put me off drinking for life. I haven't been in a pub in I don't know how long. I have a drink at the club with my wife – we've been married 35 years, she deserves a medal. She actually got a few. We've been together 37 years. When we lived in the country, we'd go out Saturday night; I would drive and drink half a glass of wine all night. I've got a mental block about pubs.

I suppose. But by the way, I don't mind any of my kids or my wife drinking. My youngest kid is 32, she's a vascular surgeon – first kid in my family to go to university. One's got an MBA from Imperial Business School and a degree from Edinburgh, and the other's got a full medics PhD from UCL and is now a first-year registrar vascular surgeon. Look, when you grow up in a dysfunctional home – it wasn't as bad as it could have been because my dad was always pissed, so he didn't know what he was doing half the time. He worked, but he would drink all day. We never had any money. One thing I learned, if I got a bit of money I could help my mom, and that made me feel good because my mom deserved help. She brought up three boys – I have a twin brother and an older brother. I always have to apologize to them for getting all the good looks and the money in the family. I'm only joking. Working gave me a structure to my life. I was working at 15. Someone once said to me, 'If you'd gone to university, would you be as successful as you are now?' I'd say if I hadn't been in the scouts, I wouldn't be as successful. Not going to university allowed me to think laterally, work things out for myself, without a structured way of thinking. It suited me. But I would bend over backwards to send my children to university and give them the opposite education. Working hard gave me security, structure, and meant I could help my mom. I would work a night shift at Western Union when I was 16, including Christmas Day. I did a 14-hour shift, but frequently I'd finish at 6 am and meet my mom to go office cleaning with her. I would hoover for her, then get home about 9. I gave all my weekly wage to her. I wanted to help her as much as I could. The harder I worked, the more rewarded I got. It gave me control over my life. Starting my own company – I love having my own company. It's like going into a pub is a mental block, and selling my company is a bit of a mental block.

£50 million. That was probably back about '97, '98, from a bank in the city. I'll tell you the story. We had this beautiful country house by then, the company was five, six, seven years old. I'd invented the internet platform, banks wanted to get into it. That day I had a meeting with a bank we had a relationship with – I won't tell you their name. My wife said, 'What are you doing today?' I said, 'Going up to London, got lunch with these people.' 'What do they want?' 'I don't know, just a business lunch.' By the end of the lunch they said, 'Peter, we want to buy your company.' 'Oh, okay. How much?' They said, 'How much is it worth?' I said, 'We make £5 million a year, last year we made £10, two years ago we made £2.' They said, '£50 million we'll offer you for your company.' It wasn't quite as blasé and relaxed as that, but they said if everything stacked up it would be all cash down and options – never got that far, but it would have been a chunk of £30-40 million, then to balance an earn-out. I said, 'I'll think about it, but the answer is no.' I went home that night and my wife asked how the meeting was. I said, 'You know, they offered £50 million for the company.' She said, 'Oh, that's great, fantastic!' I said, 'No, don't get excited.' She said, 'Peter, are you stupid? For God's sake, this could set us up for life!' I said, 'I think it'll be worth 10 times that in the next five years. Why do I want to sell it now? We don't need anything, got a lovely house, kids in private school, we're doing okay. Leave me alone, let me do it.' She's been very supportive – she just wanted to shock me a little bit, but she always lets me make the decisions and they've turned out the right ones, touch wood.

It's beyond that. We're a public company now, listed. I've sold over the years. Goldman Sachs bought 10% back in 2006/07. Today my wife and I own just below 70% of the company. We're on the stock exchange, we have 30% of shareholders. I love being a public company. 27 years a private company, I just felt it was the right thing to do. I sold 30% and got money for that. But it opens more doors. Companies liquidity, we've got 300 technology partners around the world. I think it gives them comfort that we're listed on the London Stock Exchange, we must have gone through rigorous testing. Being a public company gives them comfort. Does it help with scale? It gets you lots of free advice from investors because they want you to do well. Though there are barriers – you can only discuss so much due to insider trading rules – but they give really good free advice because they're on your team. We're lucky to have three or four cornerstone investors who've been with us a long time. Of course, being a public company you have to do lots of reporting, but I let others do that and I take the credit. I think I've earned it after 30 odd years.

Yeah, yeah, it could have been 51%, but isn't 70% another level of control? Technically no. The logic behind it was, what is the minimum amount I have to sell? They said 25%. I owned 90% then, Goldman Sachs owned 10%, so I said I'll sell 25%, I don't want to sell anymore. The company's valuation fluctuates quite a lot. It's one of my bugbears – I think we are undervalued. We spent £100 million plus on technology, our technology is superb, but we don't get credit. People just see us as a market-making trading company that manages risk, when in fact 20% of our business is non-risk and we have 300 technology partnerships around the world. It's frustrating to get investors to understand. I just sold 25%, and after the greenshoe we ended up with about 63%. Then we've been doing a share buyback because you only need 10% on the stock exchange now.

First of all, I haven't got a yacht, I've never owned a yacht. I know research says that, but you don't want to believe everything. I'm 69 in a month, I'll be 70 next year. I do have succession planning within the company – you have to have that. I have people who've been with me over 20 years who understand the business. I don't quite know what retirement is because I love working here. I love coming in, I love the challenge. If you spoke to any of my senior team, they'd say I add a lot of value. I do a lot of mentoring now. I often say to my senior team, you should be paying me to work here because if you look at my success, my doors open to whoever wants to come and see me at a senior level. They get free advice, free mentoring about business. I really enjoy coming in, and guess what, if I want a day off to play golf, no one says anything.

Yeah, well, I don't quite know what my handicap is, but let's work on three handicap. I interviewed Kevin Pietersen, he's off two, used to play at Wentworth. I once played golf with Ted Dexter – he was a scratch golfer. Three is not bad for an old boy. I've just got back from a bucket list golf trip to America. I took my golf coach, two guys from the company, and my golf buddy. We went over on a private jet and I played Augusta National Golf Club – that was my dream – with Sandy Lyle, the 1988 champion. I used to play single figures when I was a kid. Sandy was the trailblazer, such a talented golfer. I got the chance to play with him at Augusta. I was overwhelmed to be honest. Every hole has a story – Bobby Watson, Sergio Garcia, Tiger, Sandy Lyle on 18. When we got to the 18th, Sandy took an iron off the tee, hit it 245 yards with a one iron, went into the bunker on the left. He was the first ever to win the Masters by birdie on the last hole, hit a 7-iron out of the bunker onto the green, left a 10-foot putt, and held it. We took a picture pointing to the spot. Then we played Pebble Beach, three courses in California, Kiawah Island, the ocean course, and Sawgrass – the famous 17th hole with the green in the middle of a lake. I hit a rescue 7-iron on there, two-putted for a par, got a little plaque. We played nine golf courses in 13 days. I said to my wife it's a one-off, but when I got back she asked how it was, and I said it's a one-off golf trip every year.

I've always played sport. I had two minor knee operations about five years ago, and someone asked what was wrong. I said 50 years of sport. As a kid I loved football, running, squash, skiing. Then I got into golf. I find that if I don't do something for myself, I play Saturday morning, get up early, same time 6:00 – actually earlier – and I'm in the office by 7:30. I'm not lying in bed getting in at 10:30. I'm in here every day before 8:00. I need that time for myself. I play golf Saturday mornings, take my wife out every Saturday night – bloody nuisance sometimes – but we go out. Sunday lunch sometimes, or during the week, but I tend not to go out in the week now. I'm in the House of Lords sometimes – I leave here at 3:00 or 4:00, can be in the Lords till midnight. It's sporadic. It's recess now, will open for a couple of weeks in September, then closed for conference season, then government legislation.

Hey, quick one.

I should just say one thing about the House of Lords. People don't really understand the function of the House of Lords. It's a great honor and privilege, and people like to knock it. They say it's cronies of the political parties, unelected. But the thing about the House of Lords is its function is to check, like a compliance department, any laws that come from government. All laws are made in the House of Commons by elected politicians with a manifesto. They get elected, they put the government in, and the prime minister's job is to deliver on the promises. When those promises come through and there's a change in laws, like the Brexit deal, they put legislation through and it comes into the House of Lords for checking. The Commons and Lords work quite well together. Recently they asked me to sit on a committee – the Charities Commission committee. The government and opposition, a coalition, asked various charities, Law Society, Charitable Commission to review existing laws and recommend changes to help charities become more efficient. The Lords conducted that process; we would call in witnesses, listen, and there were 45 amendments to improve the law. The Lords' role is crucial because we do the grunt work for the government. You can get paid in the Lords – I don't claim a penny. The chairman of the committee was an eminent clever legal person, one of the top legal brains in the country. I don't know if he claimed his daily allowance of £300. I never claimed a penny, not even for a stamp.

Doing it for Queen and Country, right? It's me saying to the Queen and the country, 'I'd like to contribute to this.' He oversaw all of that, he managed it, he was the chairman, he guided us all through it. We all had our input, but even if he claimed his daily expenses, £300 a day is not very much for the Master of the Rolls to conduct a review of charitable law in this country. So I'd just like to stand up for the House of Lords in that sense: there's an awful lot of good people in there contributing to the country and supporting the government's legislation, whichever side, doesn't matter what your political views are. Supporting government legislation is very important. Because I only tend to read negative press. Lots of people go into the Lords for different reasons. People like to say, 'Oh, he's a big Tory donor, he gave money.' But let me tell you the real reason I'm in the House of Lords: I co-founded an organization called Vote Leave. Remember that group? The ones that won the EU referendum. I co-founded it and put money in to keep that organization afloat. It's all in the book now. Whether you're a Brexiteer or a Remainer is not the issue. My side of the argument was I think we should leave the European Union, and you can hate me or love me for that. But we've had Nigel Farage on the show twice. Yeah, Nigel, he did a lot for the Brexit cause, but he wasn't connected to Vote Leave; he had his own separate organization. The reason I'm in the House of Lords is that as a Brexiteer, the country voted. The biggest democratic vote in the history of this country: 30 odd million votes, we won by about 1.6 million votes. The biggest democratic process ever witnessed. Vote Leave got 17.4 million votes, Remain got 16 million. Maggie Thatcher, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson at their peak never got 17 million votes. So the people — if you think of the logic, if you look at the House of Lords, it's primarily made up of Remainers, people that want to keep us in the House of Lords. I was put in the House of Lords by Boris Johnson along with about ten other Brexiteers. Now that's representative of the electorate. It's more representative of the electorate than having the House of Lords which is about 75% Remain supporting. Right? So I've been donating to the Conservative Party for 12 years. No one ever put me in the House of Lords for being a donor, even though my pockets are deep, and I never asked for it. But being a Brexiteer –

So I sued a newspaper over the Sunday Times. It's all in there, part of the reason I wrote the book actually was to lay out my side of the argument on that. But basically the Sunday Times covertly filmed me. They came in and said that they were donors. They came through the Conservative Party – I was the treasurer and on the board – and they said, 'We want to donate.' So I said, 'Okay, yeah, this is what you do.' And they said, 'We want to be a big donor. What's a big donor?' I said, 'Quarter of a million.' You know, it's all on whatever you donate is public knowledge, that's the law. Nothing to do with me. They accuse me of selling access to David Cameron right for a quarter of a million. I mean, they – if you look at the backdrop about loans and so on – they accused me of selling access to David Cameron, which was nonsense because first of all, if you want access to David Cameron, it's on the website and it's in a brochure: join the Leaders Group for £50,000 a year and you can meet David Cameron. So I don't quite know that. But to cut a long story short, I had to resign. I call it constructive dismissal, but there's no hard feelings. What's in the past is in the past. I sued the Sunday Times, and five judges in three different courts found the two journalists and the newspaper to be malicious liars. There were two or three claims in there – you know, liable and malicious falsehoods – which I won. The last point was that the Court of Appeal, they appealed, they said that I was selling tickets to the Conservative Party event and it was inappropriate, unacceptable, and wrong. These are the Court of Appeal judges. They said that parties should raise money in that way. So the Court of Appeal and the defense moved the argument away from what was actually said into a wider context that, 'Oh, it's completely wrong that the Prime Minister should meet donors if they buy a ticket for the Black and White Party or for the Christmas party.' But that's not what the article was about. The article – so they managed to shift the argument. And if you read the process, there's all sorts of dark arts going on. So effectively, the Court of Appeal said I lost part of the case, but not the malicious falsehoods and the criminality and stuff like that. I won that. But what the Court of Appeal moved – and their team moved – 'Well, actually it's not what Cruddas has said, it's actually the concept.' But all political parties raise money through social events anyway. If there's a moral to all of this, it's that probably best not get involved with politics.

So yes or no is the answer, really. Can you balance a political career and a business career? Yes, I think it can. Does the government have enough smart business people advising them? Probably. Probably the real issue here is the grief you get once you get involved with politics. The press here are so vicious. But the real issue here is, is there enough talent that wants to go into politics? Yes, there is. Are there enough business people involved? Probably. But once you put your head above the parapet, you seem to be fair game for vicious press. The press nowadays, I think, is completely out of hand. They've become like – they're not impartial anymore. It's very hard to find true stories, true news. There's a lot of suppression of things that can be negative towards one political party, and there's no balance. And if you're on the receiving end of that, you just imagine, you know – I mean, just imagine the grief that Boris Johnson has had as Prime Minister. And you'll get a load of people shouting at this saying, 'Well, he deserves it.' What do you think of his tenure? Well, I think he's been very good. I mean, if you think of what he inherited: first of all, government was blocked, no legislation was getting through. Mrs. May had some of the biggest defeats ever. You've got Remainers, you got Brexiteers fighting it out, and we were in gridlock, nothing was moving. That's the first thing. Boris came along and has got Brexit delivered. That's delivering on the mandate from the electorate. Whether you're a Remainer or not, it's not the point. You know, secondly, we had the pandemic. Boris went out and bought vaccines before they were approved. I mean, that – if you want entrepreneurialism in government, there's a very good example there. He went out and bought AstraZeneca, bought 100 million quid's worth, and said, 'They're mine,' even though they'd not been approved. Then they got approved. That was smart. And delivered the furlough scheme and kept people's jobs alive. I mean, you got to say fair enough. And at the end of the day, if you don't agree with any of that, there's one thing you can't argue with: Boris got the biggest majority since Maggie Thatcher – 43% of the popular vote – and he won an 80-seat majority. He got a mandate from the British people, and whatever your politics are, you have to respect democracy. And I'm a Conservative, I'm a Brexiteer, so I lean towards Boris. But the reality is, at the end of the day, this is about democracy. And Boris, I think, has been bullied out of office, and it's unacceptable. I don't like bullies, nobody likes bullies. But he's been ganged up on, he's been plotted against, and we should not accept that. We should not accept that as a nation that someone can be hounded out of office in that way. Anyway, let's not get too political. But the problem is now, once you get involved in politics, the nasty people come out of the woodwork and you get attacked and you get discredited.

Definitely. I like my life. I have a private jet. I mean, I like nice food, I like going nice places, I like living in nice homes. Yeah, it does make you happy. But ultimately you're happier if you got a good marriage. I've been married 35 years.

I've never really thought about that. I would say that what you should do if you start your own company: always put the company first. Don't – you know, it's better to keep investing. You have to keep investing in your business. You get to certain levels and then you have to keep pushing on, pushing on. So I say keep investing in your company, and always do what's right for the company, not for yourself. You can always take money out of a company, but you've got to keep investing.

Definitely. I mean, oh yeah. I mean, I've just had my golf trip to Augusta National, and I like – I like my life. I don't have yachts. I have a private jet, but it's a NetJets thing, it's not an individual thing. And so, yeah, I mean, I like nice food, I like going nice places, I like living in nice homes. Yeah, it does make you happy. But ultimately, you're happier if you got a good marriage. I've been married 35 years, been with my wife 37 years. We've developed together, the business has grown while we've been married. We've got two lovely kids and one granddaughter. So yeah, we can have a good life. But one other thing I should say is that I'm a UK resident, domiciled here. I'm PAYE. I like paying taxes. I should have said that. Funnily enough, I don't know why, but I like paying taxes because when they're as high as they are now – yeah, because the numbers in this country are distorted. We have to stop and think a little bit. So first of all, this is a great country. Every country's got its problems. It's a great country. It's got great internet access, it's got a great legal system, it's got a great policing system. The numbers here are off the scale. If I had started my company in a small Mediterranean island, the same technology, same concept, I wouldn't be making as much money as I am now. So the numbers are off the scale. The infrastructure that we have, we have stable government as well – I should have added. The infrastructure that we have in this country means that all the numbers are bigger. And I feel successful when I pay taxes. I just sent the taxman £6 million. When I IPO'd my company, we sent them £50 million. In fact, I was at a dinner with Philip Hammond, and I said, 'I'm just about to send you a check, my wife and I, for £50 million. Please make sure you spend it wisely.' I feel like – I mean, I don't have any – I lived in Monaco, it explains it in the book. People, 'Oh, you lived in Monaco, didn't pay tax.' Big mistake. I reduced my tax, but it was a false economy. And I didn't live in Monaco for economy.

Oh, 'cause you were – they say I was commuting. I did used to come every other week, but I was working from home, emails and stuff. But you lose touch, you lose the day-to-day. It's all in the book. But it was – I was a tax exile from France. We wanted to live in Cannes. My wife was born in Paris, she's British, but used to go there as a kid, and that's where we wanted to live. We wanted our kids to go to the international school, learn a language, which they did. But effectively, we only lived in Monaco because living in Cannes was even more expensive. But it was a false economy. But since that period, I come back and I'm PAYE, and I pay millions in tax. Doesn't matter as far as I'm concerned. Why? Because I can sleep at night. I'm not worried about a knock at the door. I never invest in any of these dodgy schemes like EBTS and stuff like that, or some sort of wind farm get your tax breaks stuff. I don't go anywhere near them. I'm PAYE. That's it.

I suppose you could say starting the company, but it didn't feel like a big risk at the time. I was concerned, you know. I had a good life. I had a house that's probably worth about £5-6 million now, indoor pool, great area, Mercedes car, all paid for, no mortgage. But I suppose – and then I was working for a company that wasn't going so well, so I probably had to find another living. I was running all of their operations for them, head trader, running all their risk management and stuff. So I suppose it was starting the company. But my wife, God love her, she said to me, 'You know what, Peter, start your own company, and if it doesn't work out, we can sell the house. We had a lovely house. We can go move out to Suffolk somewhere like that, get something you know, and then we'll have a bit of cash and the kids will go to the local schools.' So it's not really that big a risk. I was already at a good level. I still needed to earn income, but I had savings, had no mortgage, had a beautiful house. So starting the company was a risk in a way, and it did feel a bit nervy in the beginning, but I like a challenge.

Biggest failure? I don't know. I hope that I've had my biggest failure. I hope there's not one to come up in the future. I don't know. I'm not a negative person. I don't think about the bad times. I only think of the good times. I'm a guy that's a three-quarters glass full, you know. I think also when you're in a position like there've been so many challenges and obstacles, and you know, I think one of the biggest risks was when I started the internet. It's in the book – keep saying that, we're going to give it a big push at the end, thank you very much. So there was a knock at my door. We were working in Old Jewry, just by the city, about 30 people in the company back then, back in '94, '95, early '96. There was a knock at my door. I was in my room. I had a place on the dealing desk and a place my own office where I could do some letters and stuff. And in walks two of my directors – well, there's only three of us. One was company secretary, and one was the accountant, and they said, 'Peter, look, this internet stuff you've just spent a whole year's profit on it. We were making about £700,000 a year. They said, 'You spend all this money on the internet and it hasn't worked. Cut your losses.' Are they still in the company? No. 'Cut your losses. Now's the time.' And I said, 'No, it's going to work.' And I didn't know it was going to work, but I had to. I had to sort of support myself. Nobody in the company – out of the 30 people, some of them didn't really know what was going on, but probably 20-25 people in the company were not supporting it. I was on my own. I thought, 'No, I'm not going to abandon this. This is going to work. This is going to work.' And three months later, we got it going. And I don't really think about failure. I don't have time for that. If something goes wrong, probably there's lots of failures, things go wrong. Just get on with it, stop complaining, and keep pushing forward. Because the world is full of talented poor people. Don't be one of them.

What should be success? My marriage, I would think. Great wife, love each other. Two great kids, successful kids. Put a lot of effort into them. I'm in the House of Lords. I'm an entrepreneur. I've made a huge amount of money. I left school at 15, no qualifications. My dad was an alcoholic. My whole life's a success if you think about it. That's the trailer there, Harry. You know, you can cherry-pick parts of it that have not been good, but what's the point of that? If you think of my journey, and I never really think about it, but just sitting here with you, relaxing, enjoying the interview, thinking about it, I thought, 'Well, hang on a minute.' I mean, you should see my house in Mayfair. It's a mansion. We've got seven floors, a lift in it. I was brought up on a council estate. There are pictures of where I was born. There were five of us in a two-bed flat. We never had any money. I never went to a restaurant with my parents. I never went to the dentist until I took myself off at 15, had three teeth removed. But it wasn't that we were in poverty. My mom worked, my dad worked as well, and he would give my mom money, but we never had any spare cash. So if you think of that journey: I've got an IQ of 155. I left school at 15. I was office cleaning with my mom. Where I am now in the House of Lords, I've got a doctorate from Oxford University, I was on the board of Harris Manchester College, I've got a visiting professorship from Loughborough, and I've also got a doctorate from Loughborough. So there's a lot of positive things, and I'm a three handicap golfer, and I played Augusta National, and I played Pebble Beach, and I nearly got a hole in one at TPC Sawgrass. What's not to love?

Wow. You can see me in the front row if you watch William leaving at the end with my wife. Not bad, not bad, not bad. Used to feed the corgis under the table with the Queen and Prince Philip.

Well, I've got – and we haven't really talked about this – but I've got a charitable foundation, the Peter Cruddas Foundation. We have helped 300 charities around the country, and it's self-funded. I just put the money in, and so far we've given away about £20 million. But what we try to do is help young people from a disadvantaged background. Like the Scouts – I was the biggest donor at one time – the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme, the Prince's Trust. I was on the board of the Prince's Trust. I'm on the Rise board there. Oh, it's brilliant, it's a great charity. I got the Business Loans for Wales up and running. Giving back, I feel like it's part of my job to mentor people and to help people. Can't help everybody, but within my circle, if I see people trying to help, my kids try to help people in this world because I love my life. I think I deserve everything I've got. Nobody's ever given me a penny. I've had to do everything myself. But that in itself is more rewarding. So yeah, I feel if I can help someone – I don't mean someone sending me a begging letter, I get a few of those – I mean, I just want to help people where I can, and through a charity.

Brilliant, brilliant. Maybe there's something there. Thank you. Good luck with that. That's probably not talked about enough, is it, that side of business?

Well, here you go. I don't know his, but I know – I mean, I don't monitor my wealth on a daily basis because a lot of it is in the shares in the company. But I know one day I probably made about £150 million in one day, but probably lost £100 million in one day when the share price dropped.

Well, you know, if you've got a company that's worth one and a half billion, which we were at our peak, and your stake in that is a billion, and the shares drop 10% in a day, which they have done, you lose £100 million. But they can go up 20% in the day, so probably I've made £200 million in the day. But people might get impressed with that, but it's no different really to owning your house. I mean, you might buy a house for a million quid, and then five years later it's worth one and a half million quid. Seven years later, it may be worth 1.3 million, but you're still living there. Actually, it doesn't matter what it's worth until you come to sell it. And when I mean sell it, I don't mean trade up or trade down, but when you say, 'Right, my kids have grown up, they've gone off, they got married, or they're off to uni, I'm going to get out of this house and buy something smaller.' That's when it matters. But in the meantime, if you like it and you enjoy it and you pay your mortgage and you pay your rates and you cut the grass, doesn't matter really what it's worth, is it, if it's where you want to be?

Probably my house. Definitely my house in Mayfair. Probably cost me about £55 million. A bit more, maybe. It's all public record. Paid £42 million for a mansion in Mayfair, probably spent another £10-15 on it. Yeah, the stamp duty! I've never met anyone like you that loves paying tax so much.

Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. No, but I'm only telling you this not to impress people. I mean, I live my life, I've got my kids, I'm too old for all of that now. I'm trying to tell people how successful people think, because if you ever get into that position, then you can become a better business person if you think like a successful person. And that's the point of me telling you this stuff. It's not to say, 'Oh, I spent £5 million on this.' You know, I can go out tomorrow and buy whatever I want, but I don't, because I'm happy. I'm happy with my life and happy with the company and so on. But if you ever get to that level, then just pay your taxes, give to charity. I promise you, you will become more successful as a business person and an individual than not doing that stuff.

I can remember the worst advice I've ever received, and fortunately I never took it up. They said, 'Become a Lloyd's underwriter.' This was back in the '80s. Someone I knew said, 'Oh, what you do is you commit all of this...' I said, 'Well, why are they going to send me a check every year?' 'Oh, well, because you have to commit a certain sum.' I said, 'How much?' 'All of your wealth.' I said, 'Bugger that, I'm not doing that.' So that was the worst advice, but I didn't take it. The best advice? I don't know. Take a three wood and not the one wood? Play it a bit safer?

No, I mean, good advice? I don't know. Just my life is so full every day, there's a thousand decisions. I just keep making them. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, but just keep moving forward.

Passport to Success. Yeah. Peter Cruddas. Got it. So here's the story about the book. I was on holiday in Switzerland skiing. I started reading a book, and it was one of Alex Ferguson's books. I'm an Arsenal supporter, someone bought it as a joke for me. And I got out my iPad and I went through what book should I read, and I started reading Ray Dalio's book – which is quite funny, he's been on the show yeah, has he? – and John D's book was quite good, but I like autobiographies. I thought, 'Right, Alex Ferguson, let's have a read of this.' This player I've hated for years who actually I ended up admiring – I like successful people, great success, and got nothing but respect for the man, even though he beat us a couple of times. So I'm reading this book. It wasn't his main autobiography, it was some sort of book that he decided to write or got a ghost writer. I started reading, I thought, 'This book's crap, I can't read this.' Not his main one – his main one's good, I read that. So I thought, 'I could do better than this.' And then bang, the old light bulb went on. I was sitting in Samnaun in a hotel with my wife and kids, and I thought, 'You know what, when I get back, I'm going to write a book. I'm going to write my story.' And I started writing the book, and I wrote 90,000 words in 90 days. I sat there typing. I did it here in the office. I still type 80 words a minute on my emails. I couldn't stop. And then I started writing bullet points down; I thought, 'No, if you can't think of it, don't go back to the bullet point, just write it all naturally.' And I wrote everything from memory. I wrote 90,000 words, and then I parked it. And it just literally it's the easiest thing I've ever done. It just flooded out of me. It was the right time. After 90 days, no weekend writing, just 9-to-5 writing. I pared it and thought, 'What am I going to do with this book?' And I left it, did nothing. And then I thought, 'I might publish it, just give it as gifts to my family and stuff like that.' And then someone said, 'Yeah, but if it gets out somewhere, they'll write some negative stuff. So if you're going to publish it, publish it, or don't publish it at all.' Then I got word that I was on the list for the House of Lords. I thought, 'I better not publish it, I might piss somebody off and that might not happen.' So I didn't publish it. Then COVID came. Then I got in the House of Lords and I'm still sitting on the draft. And then there's all this negativity about me going into the House of Lords. I've never had so much negativity since I've got into politics. And I thought, 'This is bang out of order.' Because there's this committee that sits to decide whether you get accepted or not into the House of Lords. Now bear in mind, I won my court cases, the police and the Electoral Commission said I did nothing wrong, my tax records are all up to date. There was no reason why I shouldn't be accepted into the House of Lords. And Boris Johnson overrode the commission – first time in 20 years since the committee has been formed – 'Cruddas has done nothing wrong, his record's clean, you got no reason to stop this.' And he put a letter in the public domain, it's in the book. And then I thought, 'You know what? Once I got in the Lords, I've had enough of this shit. I'm going to start fighting back. Fuck it.' And then I wrote another 20,000 words and I laid it all out there about the court case and the appeal and the dark arts and the underhanded things that happened to me, the way I was treated by David Cameron, who I call Waldorf in the book, and Andrew Feldman, who was the chairman, Waldorf and Statler from the Muppet Show. They're those two old guys, oblivious to what's going on down below but pontificating about the show, not really paying attention. So I called them Waldorf and Statler. And about the journey about Brexit and stuff. And there's a lot of chapters in there about the court case. But I thought, 'I have to get my side of the story out.' So once I got in the Lords and I still got criticism, I published the book. And I'm glad I did. It's one of the best things I've ever done. And I'm thinking about a second one now. But I wrote it all myself. And the publisher said, 'We want copyright over it.' I said, 'Look, we want control over what we publish because we're the publishers.' And I said, 'You know what? I'll tell you what, you can have that control on one condition: that if I don't like what you've done, I can walk away and I'll pay your fees and expenses.' And they said, 'Fair enough.' They literally took out of it – it's probably about 118,000 words they took out of it, a couple of percent. Everything in there is what I've written. They cut out repetition, they moved one chapter forward and put the other one, that's all they did. Everything in there is my own words apart from the quotes. And it is a great experience, and I'm proud of it, and I'm proud of my life, what I've achieved. But you know what? The best is yet to come.

It's a good question actually, and I often use that term in this company. But I think the point is, you can break that down into many things. You can say, 'What's disruption?' You can say, 'I'm going to undercut a competitor, I'm going to disrupt their market,' and all of that applies. The biggest disruption you can do is to yourself, to the company. You disrupt yourselves. Why? As a company, if you've got a successful company and you're doing well, why wait for others to come along and disrupt you? Disrupt yourself. That's what we do. We challenge ourselves in here. We look at our pricing. We're about to launch a big new investment platform. Some would say it would rival Hargreaves Lansdown, but they're a big company, they've been going 20 odd years. But we're going to disrupt ourselves around pricing, and we're going to keep pushing the barriers much higher for people to come in and disrupt us. So be on the front foot with disrupting. Don't wait for others to disrupt you and your business model. Make sure you cannot be disrupted. And then when you've done that, disrupt yourself. We're always challenging. I come in and I'll say, 'Yeah, that's great, but you need to invest more money in technology.' You can disrupt yourself not just by pricing, you can disrupt yourself by improving technology. So you get a new piece of technology, it's fantastic, and then the next question is, 'Well, what are we going to do to improve it?' Just keep drilling down on it, drilling down on it, and it makes it harder for people to disrupt you. And be honest about it. Be honest about your business model. There are a few companies out there that think their business models are finished today. I don't think I should say that. Well, what kind of industry? Anybody that brokers other people's products. I remembered when I first started the internet, and the lightbulb moment to me was that if you were a travel agent, then your business model is not going to last because BA would be out to sell you seats on their planes directly using the internet. So that business model, that broker in between, is where I thought that type of business would suffer. Anything where you're selling other people's products, because the manufacturer can sell them direct to you. And you're seeing that all the time. I guess even in property, property websites and so on, people selling their houses themselves online, recruitment agencies – we get a lot of people out of LinkedIn now. You can advertise jobs. We save millions every year not going through recruitment agencies. Recruitment agents are still doing well because there's such a demand, there's a million job shortage in this country. But at the end of the day, we get a lot of talent off LinkedIn. You go on there, you can see their background. So stuff like that. Got to keep disrupting yourself. Keep disrupting yourself, don't let others do it to you.

Well, thank you, Rob. And I actually have to admit, I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Yeah, you too.