The Spectator’s Notes | 31 March 2012

As one who has had the pleasure of meeting Peter Cruddas, without being an undercover reporter, I see the latest scandal about party funding rather differently from most. Mr Cruddas has the curious, attractive unworldliness which often goes with being a very successful self-made businessman. He is the son of an alcoholic taxi-driver from Hackney, and he left school with no qualifications. He took a menial job in a bank and found that he was clever with the tickertape machines of that time (the 1970s). This was the germ of something big. In the internet era, he worked out how to capture, convey and help people bet on market information. When he had made a really enormous sum of money — a value of about £1.2 billion at the height — he felt grateful to Britain, Mrs Thatcher, the Queen etc. So he started to give lots of money to charity, especially royal charity, and to the Conservatives.