Dale Vince is angry. The green energy tycoon, eco-campaigner and major Labour donor is not the sort to hide it. When we meet, he’s bristling, his frustration pouring out.
There’s The Observer, which he was keen to explore buying but says he never got the chance. On Friday, the owner of The Guardian confirmed a deal had been approved to sell The Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, founded in 1791, to Tortoise Media.
Then there’s the divorce from wife, Kate, which has been going on for three years, running up enormous legal bills. This week will mark another round with the pair due in court for a 10-day hearing.
Let’s begin with The Observer. The boards of Guardian Media Group or GMG and its owner, Scott Trust, have approved the sale to Tortoise, the long-form journalism platform run by former BBC executive and Times editor, James Harding. The news emerged after a 48-hour strike by journalists at The Observer and its sister title, The Guardian, protesting the sale.
Vince, 63, held a meeting with a senior GMG director in November. Vince said how serious he was and that he would like to see the paper’s figures.
“I was told that because of the exclusivity arrangement they’d entered with James Harding that was impossible. Provided the agreement with Harding remained live, their hands were tied.”
The GMG director said that contrary to what was being said, GMG cared deeply about The Observer’s future and that of its journalists, and for that reason they were “taking a diligent approach”. Vince was asked if the Harding sale didn’t go ahead would he still be interested? “I said I would, for the same reasons I remain interested now.”
Which are? “The future of The Observer is important for media plurality in this country. Too much of it is owned by right-wingers. I’m left wing and I want there to be a better balance, which can only be good for democracy.”
It is thought the Sunday paper did not fit with GMG’s plans which focused on The Guardian and expanding that paper’s global digital reach across seven days.
“Why they were selling it was not really my concern. What I could not understand was why they were going with a preferred bidder at such an early stage. Normally, you offer something up for sale, invite bids, then choose one as your preference and negotiate with them. But they didn’t do that, they went straight to talking with James Harding.”
Adding to the oddness were “question marks over James Harding’s funding and his ability to continue funding the paper”.
Harding says he has the backing, but it’s been boosted by an investment from Scott Trust, making it a shareholder in Tortoise with a seat on both the company’s commercial and editorial boards.
Vince, who is worth an estimated £100m, says he believes he would have had no problem finding the money – all he wanted was to see the books. “They wouldn’t show me any numbers. I had to see them – you can’t have a profit and loss, without an income and I didn’t know what it was. I knew so little.”
What he did realise was that “The Observer needs its own website, it needs subscribers, it needs investment in its journalism”.
The Scott Trust “is wealthy, it has £1.3bn in the bank. Yet it wanted to get rid of The Observer. Why? I can see the predicament they were in; they didn’t want to create a separate brand which would compete online with The Guardian”.
GMG said they received no substantive offers, apart from Harding’s. But Vince says that’s because in his case he could not make a substantive offer without access to the figures and they were only made available to Harding.
Towards the close of the meeting, Vince says he was asked if he might be willing to invest in Tortoise. He was taken aback; it had never crossed his mind.
What riles him, he claims, is that the entire meeting was then later portrayed within the higher echelons of GMG and Scott Trust as having been a discussion about Vince’s potential interest in backing Harding, which he insists was not the case. “It was raised only right at the very end, and by them.”
To his divorce.
The fallout from his split with Kate, 50, has been repeatedly aired in the press, with Vince accused of rushing through the divorce because he expected a knighthood or peerage from Labour and he didn’t want her to share the honour.
The result, he says, is a battle that has been raging for three to four years and is likely to cost upwards of £4m in legal fees by the time it is over. “We were going along smoothly, then everything just stopped.
They met in the 1990s when Kate began working at Ecotricity. They married in 2006 and have a teenage son. Says Vince: “The only issue between us is money, it’s all about the money.”
Starting this week, there will be a 10-day trial and “it will be a terrible waste of time, money and life. We should have done what we could have done, which was to sit in a room and agree it all”.
Vince pauses. “It feels like everyone wants their day in court, everyone that is, except me.”
He will be in court later this week and is bracing himself for more of the same.
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