Sir James Dyson would make a good therapist for anxious Brexiteers. Everything about him is comfortingly precise — his manner and way of speaking, his owlish round glasses and blow-dried white hair. He exudes a Zen-like calm.
What he has to say is reassuring, too. He is as sunnily optimistic about leaving the EU as he was before the referendum last year.
‘I am very confident,’ he says, ‘in our ability to negotiate trade deals outside Europe — with Japan, Australia, China, America and so on — because it’s very easy. It’s just us negotiating with them. It’s very, very straightforward and you don’t have to satisfy 27 other people.’
The implication is that a deal with the EU will be harder. He confirms: ‘My view is we almost certainly won’t get a deal. We’ll have to walk away.’
But Dyson doesn’t think that matters. Falling back on World Trade Organisation rules would be ‘no big deal’, he says, because for him it would just lead to a 3 per cent tariff. ‘Frankly,’ he says, ‘lowering corporation tax a few percentage points would pay for that.’
We meet not at his technology company’s swanky headquarters in Wiltshire but at a place that he has kept very quiet about until now — his farm, or one of them to be precise, in the depths of rural Lincolnshire.
Near the farm, shiny new lorries are powering along the road with Beeswax, his farm company’s name, emblazoned on the front. They wouldn’t look out of place in the American Midwest. His total farming estate, I learn, is the biggest in the UK, encompassing 33,000 acres in Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. The Spectator is the first publication to be shown round.
In many ways, Dyson the farmer is returning to his roots.
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