The unfair attack on Savile Row hero Pierre Lagrange

The Daily Mail has a new target – Pierre Lagrange. The enormously successful hedge funder has found himself in the cross hairs because he claimed money from Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme for some of the staff at Huntsman – the All-Blacks of Savile Row tailors – which Pierre bought in 2013. As hit-jobs go, it is as ill-advised as it is misinformed, so I thought I’d explain why.

The clickbait premise by journalist Nick Craven was that Pierre should have paid all the staff out of his own pocket rather than get support from the government. He backed up Lagrange’s evil-hedge-funder status by saying that he was ‘famous for his colourful love life’ – whether by ‘colourful’ he meant being gay, divorced or currently one half of an interracial marriage, I will leave Craven to elaborate. It’s too icky an adjective for me to want to look too closely at.

There was one factor that was entirely omitted by this article, which was that despite the shaky start – some tailors left unsure of the new direction it may take – Pierre Lagrange is one of the heroes of Savile Row and British tailoring.