The Tory donor who’ll take a sword to the ‘morons’

Buried deep in the Sunday Times is the Tories’ answer to the problem that is Lord Ashcroft. James Tyler is a fund manager who has donated £250,000 to the Tory party since 2007. He is that rare creature: a multi-millionaire who is both resident and domiciled in merry old England. Tyler’s chief attraction for the Tories is his virulent opposition to what he terms ‘the morons’ – City Boys taking excessive risk and Gordon Brown’s culpability in the financial collapse. It was his subject in a speech to the Adam Smith Institute last year and he remains consumed by it. The Sunday Times reports:

‘His chief bête noire is the rampant creation of money and the inflation target of 2% set by the government. The system, he says, “loots pensions, savings, fixed incomes and the actions of the prudent” while rewarding “the biggest borrower of all: the government”. His secondary targets are the big banks that lend depositors’ money many times over, keeping just a tiny fraction in reserve.