People: ‘Goodbye Dave’

Small company financier Tony Drury, founder of investment group St. Helen’s Capital, has fallen out of love with the Conservative Party and published an electronic book to explain his disillusionment.  “Goodbye Dave’ is a personal account of Drury’s business and political career, which included floating successful publisher Quercus on PLUS and a string of AIM floats as well as years as a Tory councillor in Bedfordshire and a prime mover in the Blue Dragon Club for Welsh Conservatives.

Drury, who became chairman of Axiom Capital, the Golders Green-based PLUS-oriented financial adviser set up by wheeler-dealer David Sinclair, after it ran into regulatory issues, is dismayed by what he sees as the Prime Minister’s lack of principle and well-heeled opportunism. Coalition with the Liberal Democrats particularly incenses him.

‘Goodbye Dave’ contains many insights and descriptions of Drury’s dealings with the ’great and the good’ of business and politics. He describes an unexpectedly successful lunch with a former senior Cabinet minister, which ends in tears after something Drury mentions in all innocence but does not divulge in the book (though it is believed by some readers to refer to the personal entanglements of a particularly entrepreneurial business contact).

Drury ends his book with an invitation for readers to join ‘Enterprise Britain’, the on-line small company ginger group with which he is involved. Of Cameron, he writes ‘frankly, he worries the living daylights out of me.’