Godfather of ‘Brexit’ Takes Aim at the British Establishment
Arron Banks ..
Mr. Banks plowed $11 million of his personal fortune into UKIP and the unofficial Leave.EU campaign and raised an additional $5 million. Though a small figure by American standards, it made him the single biggest political donor in British history.
.. The Brexit win thrilled Donald J. Trump, who saw in that blow to elite complacency and hierarchy a model for his presidential campaign. And it was Mr. Banks who exchanged ideas on tactics with Mr. Trump’s team throughout their campaigns, making visits with Mr. Farage to Trump rallies.
.. “Never apologize,” he said he had told Mr. Trump. “Facts are white noise,” and “emotions rule.”
.. “We realized we were up against the same kind of enemy and we had to play dirty, and we did,” he said in the interview at Old Down Manor, a Gloucestershire estate hotel he owns.
.. Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Banks sees himself as an outsider tearing up what he said was a cozy conspiracy between career politicians and big corporations.
.. Mr. Banks is considering starting and funding a new citizens’ movement, tentatively called Patriotic Alliance, based on the model of Italy’s Five Star Movement
.. Mounting frustration against the Tory government and a Labour Party in disarray has created an opportunity for a political movement that, “like Trump, isn’t left or right but that is radical,” Mr. Banks said.
.. Mr. Banks has always fancied himself something of an outsider, having spent much of his childhood in England but frequently visiting his father, who managed sugar estates in Africa.
.. He was expelled from a second school and never went on to college, instead selling everything from vacuum cleaners to houses. He then got into insurance, where he made his fortune ..
.. . Banks now has business interests based in the tax havens of the Isle of Man and the British Virgin Islands.
.. “When it comes down to it, Brexit and Trump were about identity. Who do you identify with?” he asked, before answering his own question: “I don’t want to be part of some French-German coalition.”
.. It was, however, only after paying for a private poll of 50,000 Britons ahead of the referendum that he and his team realized that immigration, not sovereignty, was the defining issue that would push people to vote to leave.
.. Mr. Banks, like Mr. Trump, is married to a Slav — in his case, Ekaterina Paderina, a Russian, whom the tabloids like to consider a spy
.. “It’s not complicated,” he said emphatically. “You don’t need a business plan. This is where you’re wrong. I’ve operated now 25 years without any business plan, and I’ve done pretty well.”