Inside the (very) secret world of the Barclays and an oh-so tangled web
A few years ago, I was at a fashion retailer’s collection launch in London. The crowd was packed, full of media types. In the corner, a DJ pumped out the music. The canapes were going round.
Suddenly, the throng had to part. This short figure, with what appeared to be minders either side of him, had come into the room. He was wearing a chalk pinstripe suit with slicked hair. He looked important — or rather he wanted us to think he was important. It was Howard Barclay, joint owner of the Telegraph newspaper group.
What was striking was just how much like his father and uncle he was. Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, on their rare appearances in public, would make similar entrances. Always dressed in pinstripes, their hair neatly parted, shoes highly polished, ties knotted just so, they were identical twins. They conveyed superiority, detachment and yes, a certain disdain.
David and Frederick were born in 1934 and grew up in Hammersmith and Kensington. The Barclays’ parents were Beatrice and Frederick, a travelling salesman. David and young Frederick had six other siblings. Frederick snr died when the brothers were 12. They left school as soon as they could and plied a variety of trades.
They clearly had some sort of aura back then. They liked ballroom dancing and in 1955 David, then only 21, married Zoe Newton, who went on to become the highest-paid model of the day. What’s extraordinary about their origins is not only did it give them their style but that they should go on to own the Ritz and Telegraph, two icons of the establishment, as well as both receiving knighthoods.
That sense of being different was always with them. It was something they cultivated, not just in their choice of dapper clothes and manner, but in the way they led their lives. They eschewed publicity. They lived in Monaco in a shared residence and they had another built in another tax haven, in the Channel Islands. This was a 60-room, gothic fortress on the island of Brecqhou. There they repelled nosy visitors.
Their businesses were shrouded in secrecy. For people who owned a hotel and newspaper beloved of the ruling class, and were knighted in 2000, they went to extraordinary lengths to avoid paying tax, creating a complex structure of offshore trusts. It made them seem, well, odd and mysterious. Together with a predilection for using lawyers and litigating, it gave them a threatening, to-be-feared air.
As well as the Ritz and Telegraph, they owned much more, including an online retailer, delivery service, casinos, shipping lines and properties, tons of properties. Because of their unwillingness to divulge virtually anything about themselves and because of their convoluted ownership arrangements, no one was ever sure what, exactly.
The Barclays approach to life was to invite questions but provide no answers. It was never really known, for instance, how they got started. Frederick was declared bankrupt in 1960 after a sweet and tobacconist shop he ran with his brother Douglas, called Candy Corner in Kensington, fell behind with its rental payments. For a period, Frederick was prevented from taking official positions as an undischarged bankrupt. As well as Candy Corner, he was involved in painting and decorating, doing up boarding houses for flats to rent or for hotels. David became a director of estate agents and property firms. He paid off his brother’s creditors and they were in partnership.
Even early on, they made their affairs secret. Their main estate agency, Hillgate, was registered as an unlimited company which meant they didn’t have to file publicly available accounts.
It was a mystery as to how they fell in with the Crown Agents. A government agency set up to help the colonies and developing countries do business in Britain, strangely it lent money to the Barclays. This enabled them in 1970 to buy Londonderry Hotel in Park Lane. They continued to borrow and by 1974, David and Frederick owed the Crown Agents £9.5 million — a substantial amount back then. The Crown Agents had been exceeding its brief, extending loans to property developers, not just the Barclays.
The property crash caught up with the agency and it collapsed with debts of £212 million or well over £1 billion today. They were on their way, and acquisitions followed. Always, though, there were distance and privacy. David and Frederick did not sit on the boards of British businesses they owned, their addresses were not disclosed.
Aidan, David’s oldest son, acted as a representative of his father and uncle. With Howard, he ran the Telegraph group. It was never clear how good they were at running businesses. The Telegraph changed course repeatedly and appeared to be in a state of constant flux.
Behind the scenes there were suggestions that all was not well. A court case in the US contained a reference to David suffering from an unspecified neurological complaint (their knighthoods were for services to medical research). The gravestone of Frederick snr was replaced with a new one that made no reference to Frederick jnr. David died in 2021. By then, the family had fractured to the extent that Sir Frederick and his daughter, Amanda, pursued a legal action against Aidan, Howard and Aidan’s son, Alistair, for bugging their conversations in the conservatory of the Ritz. The case was subsequently settled.
When he got divorced from his wife, Hiroko, Sir Frederick refused to pay her the £100 million he owed as part of the settlement. He claimed not to have the cash. Hiroko took him to court. In her evidence in 2022, Hiroko said how the twins fell out in 2014 and she once witnessed David and Frederick brawling with each other on board their yacht the Beatrice, named after their mother. Frederick was barred from going to Brecqhou because he would not contribute to the island’s maintenance.
At the heart of the dispute was the decision, which he said he regretted, by Sir Frederick to divide the family’s holdings four ways, between his daughter and Sir David’s three sons, Aidan, Howard and Duncan. Amanda held sway over only 25 per cent of the business. That, plus the fact the group was run entirely by Aidan and Howard, meant that Sir Frederick was cut off and seemingly cut out.
A loan from Lloyds Bank, made during the time of the financial crisis in 2008, was not repaid. It’s not clear why — whether it was simply forgotten or ignored, or if the beneficiary was Sir Frederick and the others decided not to settle it and he chose not to or couldn’t. In any event, it’s that loan which has led to Lloyds foreclosing and putting the Telegraph’s owner into administration.
As ever, where the Barclays are concerned there are more questions than answers.
