Hearts & Minds: When comms comes up against the class system

Graham King is to be congratulated and admired. He is an entrepreneur who spotted a gap in the market and went for it. He took a personal risk, invested and won. He also proved himself to be an adept manager, growing and running a substantial business with all the problems that entails. As a result, King has been named in the media as a billionaire. Except King is being pilloried.

He has done nothing wrong; he has not broken the law. Yet, he is treated as if he was a gangster drugs boss. His ‘crime’ is to have profited from providing accommodation for asylum seekers. His contracts are with the authorities and are scrutinised and tested. But the coverage is censorious, carrying more than a whiff of snobbishness.

King, we are informed, is not a businessman, but an ‘Essex businessman’. His father was a salesman. Fair enough. Hang on, though, his dad was ‘a shed salesman’. King does not just have a girlfriend but a ‘Latvian girlfriend, 18 years his junior’. King, in other words, is an unsavoury oik and most definitely not welcome at the golf club, not outside Essex anyway.

King is portrayed as someone who merely struck lucky. His success is ‘a function of increasing immigration’. He’s the bloke with a bag of umbrellas when it started to rain. His wealth has absolutely nothing to do with possessing rare commercial talent, working incredibly hard and showing focused determination.

The fact that King joins rich lists stuffed with those who turned slum dwellings into luxury apartments, took over rundown hotels and transformed them into care homes, bought abandoned factories and developed science parks and sat at trading desks and invented new forms of financial derivatives, and went on to grow corporations, employ thousands, pay enormous sums in taxes and donate heavily to charity, is forgotten. Or is it?

Because what is really evident here is an innate antipathy towards wealth creation. King’s case is British - immigration is a current national cause célèbre - although such latent hostility exists elsewhere, possibly not to the same extent, but it is there.

He shows the height that comms must still scale, even today, before respectability can be attained, if ever. As a society we applaud those who prosper while often, underneath there is resentment. Sometimes, it takes a Graham King to bring it to the surface. We should not lose  sight of that.

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.