It’s heartening to see an authentic British entrepreneur heading this year’s Sunday Times Rich List, the industrial-ist Jim Ratcliffe, who has overtaken a coach-load of oligarchs as well as the Duke of Westminster with an estimated £21 billion fortune. This column has long admired Ratcliffe, whose Ineos chemicals conglomerate was built by buying up businesses his major competitors did not want. During his stand-off with the Unite union at the Grangemouth Refinery in Scotland in 2013, I called him ‘an industrial hero’ who deserved to be made a Knight of the Thistle for his willingness to invest in such an unpromising site. While BBC Scotland expressed the more common view of him as ‘the embodiment of hard-nosed, freewheeling capital’, one of Ratcliffe’s own early business partners told me: ‘You couldn’t meet a more decent bloke. He’s very private, but he’s also incredibly generous.’
It’s fair to say that Ratcliffe’s unspun Mancunian manner has never done him any favours, however.
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