Ivan Massow with parrot (Francesco Guidicini)
This interview originally appeared in The Sunday Times
Forget the past indiscretions — escorts, drugs, boozing — and the two suicide attempts. The real thing that is likely to harm Ivan Massow’s new bid to become London’s next mayor is his disarming honesty.
He opens up about almost everything, from the time he stopped his father killing himself to the “homophobia” some gay people direct at him, his abusive childhood, what he calls his “chequered background” and his cheery sketchiness on actual policy. (Perhaps we should give him a break there: the election is still 18 months away.)
“I’m not going to be able to pull a Cameron and wow everyone immediately,” he apologises as he lets me into his vast Georgian townhouse in Bloomsbury, central London. A semi-circular curtain divides the front door from the World of Interiors kitchen. “Like the Wolseley!” he hoots.
The space is full of hot young builders, assistants, two dogs, an affectionate cat, his 19-year-old boyfriend and a grey parrot called Cleo. “I’m patron of the Skegness parrot sanctuary — please put that in.”
Politicians prefer allies to friends. However, this 47-year-old has had endless celebrity bezzies, including Charles and Camilla, Cher, George Michael, the Crown Prince of Brunei and a one-time boxing partner named Mike Tyson. Joan Collins is his “second mum”: she saved him from alcoholism after wagging her finger at his boozing in St Tropez six years ago.
People like Massow because, as one of his friends says, he does not lie. Though he is not a politician, he has shared a flat with Michael Gove, the chief whip, and the skills minister Nick Boles, advised William Hague when he was party leader, “worked a lot with George Osborne and frequently ran into [David] Cameron — but we were all just kids knocking around like bees in a jar”.
Boris Johnson, a friend for 20 years and London’s current mayor, “texted me to say good stuff, best of luck”, but other senior Tories have stayed quiet as they wait to see who else comes forward.
Is there anything in his past, I ask him, that he’s worried about coming out during this campaign?
“Nearly everything!” he roars. “It’s hard to know where to begin — I’ve had such a busy life.” True.
When he was 12, Massow’s mother had to put him up for adoption after his father turned abusive. “She had friends who were on the game; it was a different world.”
At 23, he started his financial consultancy business from a squat in Kentish Town, north London. This arranged insurance for gay people during the worst days of Aids hysteria, when many faced inflated premiums and, Massow claims, open homophobia from the industry. Soon he was driving a Ferrari and by his thirties he had four Bentleys, several houses, boats and a retinue of staff.
With a bit of nudging, he tells me he is worth just under £40m, although he has had failures. After a business went into receivership in the mid-Noughties, Massow exiled himself to Barcelona, living in a salon next to the royal family’s apartments, drinking, cruising and doing drugs.
But now he says: “I’ve been a good boy for years.” He has been teetotal since 2008, surrounding himself with other non-drinkers, and today lives quite frugally, flying easyJet, wearing M&S shirts and giving away between £25,000 and £100,000 every month to charities, businesses and the people he mentors.
“Money never really drove me. I had the boats and houses and now I realise there was nothing there — it was all a lie.”
Does he stand a chance of becoming mayor? “I’m confident: I’ve got a good team behind me.” But he doesn’t have skeletons in your cupboard: he’s got a mausoleum.
“Michael Gove said to me: ‘You’ve hung your skeletons firmly outside.’ People often claim that politicians are hypocrites: I want to be the one who’s honest, who puts who he is on his Facebook wall.”
Massow admits that he has always been “an uncomfortable fit” with the Conservative party, whose faithful are likely to hate him. He says he coined the phrase “the nasty party” in 2000, having escorted Margaret Thatcher around conference the year before. But standing apart from the Bullingdon crowd could be an asset in not-particularly-Conservative London. “The role is strangely non-party-political,” he says. “You have to be relied on to rebel.”
In any case, I doubt he cares about the shires view: he is pro-London to the point of being against the rest of the country. Announcing his bid last week, he huffed that 20% of the money generated in the capital is spent “subsidising other parts of the UK”, adding that despite this, “provincial resentment towards us grows”.
In full mayoral flow, he cries: “Let’s have a city-state feel to London: its own immigration policy and national insurance numbers, and give the rest of England a feeling of sanctity.”
Massow is probably right that Londoners will forgive him his earlier mistakes. Mavericks have thrived in the job he wants; his opponents should not underestimate him.