‘Brexit is doomed’ - Guy Hands

Mr Hands, who moved to Guernsey in 2008, was interviewed in The Times newspaper last weekend to launch the publication of his autobiography, The Dealmaker: Lessons from a Life in Private Equity, which is out next week.

He said that he was able to make the claim on the basis of how many people he knew who were fervently in favour of Brexit who had now switched sides.

‘Their reasoning is simple – they believed in Brexit, based on the UK changing radically and effectively becoming a Singapore. So, a complete reversal of UK laws around human rights, workers’ rights, minimum hours, minimum pay. The UK has, if anything, moved further along what they see as a “socialist path”,’ he said.

Mr Hands spoke at an event in Guernsey in spring of 2016, shortly before the Brexit referendum, where he outlined his support for the UK remaining part of the EU.

He told The Times that for Brexit to be a success, it would require new policies to make it work.

‘Because Brexit is about being an independent country of 60m. competing in a world of 7bn, when you don’t have an empire or a Commonwealth which actually works for you and you are totally alone. And the only way you do that is as Singapore did, by having an economic miracle.

‘Can it work? Yes. Can it work if you behave as you did when you were in the European Union? Of course not.’

Mr Hands made headlines at the weekend by claiming that he would have voted for Jeremy Corbyn at the last election, precisely because he would have been ‘ineffectual on Brexit’.

‘They would never have got a majority, but they might have got enough to stop everything,’ he said.

‘I don’t think it’s irrecoverable yet, but it’s getting very close.’

Mr Hands, who would have wished to become a Conservative MP but was stopped by his wife Julia, the woman behind the HandPicked Hotels Group which has invested heavily in Guernsey, also said the Tory party had ‘lost its way’.

‘It’s lost its reason to exist, its morality and its soul. It became about Brexit and Boris was about Brexit. Now it’s about being anti-Labour. That’s not a good reason to exist.

‘They’ve got to come up with some real things which make a difference to people’s lives.’

He also said that Britain would become smaller and more irrelevant.

‘At best we’re America’s poodle, which they kick sometimes and give a bone at others. The Europeans are fed up with us. The Russians and Chinese have no love for us. The Middle East will go where the Middle East needs to go. South Africa and Africa generally dislike us, India has got no love for us...,’ he said.

‘So maybe we’ve got Australia, but they know that their bread is buttered with either America or Asia, so I think we’re very isolated, unless we offer the world something different. And at the moment, what we’re offering is a more bureaucratic version of Europe.’

Mr Hands also said back in 2016 that he believed Brexit would be a ‘severe blow’ to the finance industry and Guernsey ‘could end up totally isolated’.