Business News
‘Panda Politics’ with China and earned enough money to retire at 40 – and now he’s helping manage £7.5 billion of clients’ money from the heart of Birmingham. Robert Vaudry has no ordinary
The Griffin Report H
Robert Vaudry’s CV includes a spell working as political adviser to former Prime Minister Ted Heath, which once took him into Saddam Hussein’s inner sanctum on an international diplomatic shuttle to save the lives of British hostages. Today, he helps manage £7.5 billion at the Wesleyan. Chamberlink’s award-winning columnist Jon Griffin went to meet him
e’s shaken the hand of Saddam Hussein to help save hostages’ lives, played
Working again after retiring at 40: Robert Vaudry at his office in central Birmingham
CV. He’s been as adept at arranging a TV interview with Dave Edna Everage as he is at running wealth management funds. For a grammar schoolboy from Croydon, Robert has done rather well for himself, occasionally in the most exotic of circumstances and company. Now Investments Managing
Director for well-known Midland financial experts Wesleyan, Robert can look back on an extraordinary 30-year plus career combining international mercy missions in brutal Middle East dictatorships with a distinguished track record in managing wealth funds. His well-appointed office in
Colmore Circus provides a panoramic view of the Birmingham skyline – but Robert’s travels over the course of a rollercoaster career have given the urbane 54-year-old a privileged insight into his two favourite subjects, politics and finance. Robert’s CV includes a spell
working as political adviser to former Prime Minister Ted Heath, which once took him into Saddam Hussein’s inner sanctum on an international diplomatic shuttle to save the lives of British hostages held by the murderous Iraqi dictator following his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. “It was surreal. Kuwait had been
invaded, and Heath had been invited to meet Saddam Hussein. It was me, Heath, and Heath’s doctor. We went over for the negotiations for the release of British hostages. We first flew to Jordan to have dinner with King Hussein. “We went to one of Saddam’s
palaces in Baghdad. We went in, I shook Saddam’s hand and sat down, and didn’t say anything. “We got around 30 British
hostages out – they let them all go. Richard Branson flew us over and was on the jet himself.” Robert was also at Heath’s side for another extraordinary
diplomatic mission as the former PM jetted out to China to meet the Communist state’s leadership in the wake of world outrage over the Tiananmen Square massacres of 1989. No hostage lives had been at risk
on that occasion – and Robert even managed to persuade their inscrutable Chinese hosts to gift Mr Heath a Chinese panda. “For the next six months, one of my many tasks was to negotiate with London Zoo and the Chinese to get a panda. “Working for Ted Heath was a
brilliant job. You ran his life, wrote his speeches, handled the media. I got him to be interviewed by Dame Edna Everage – he went along with it and it was a brilliant piece of TV. “He could be difficult around
women and would bristle, unable to give Margaret Thatcher any credit
The three PMs: Robert Vaudry (right) with three Conservative Prime Ministers. Left to right: Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990), Ted Heath (1970-1974) and Alec Douglas-Home (1963-1964) in 1991
at all. But in private, he could be the funniest man out there – he would host dinner parties at every Tory party conference and I always used to have to carry a bottle of Glenlivet whisky around with me.”
Those once-in-a-lifetime
experiences within the court of (by then deposed as PM) King Ted was followed by an MBA from London
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