UK must focus on growth rather than inflation

“I started from having nothing to lose,” he says. “I had lost a father. There is a sort of determination, I think, and [a sense of] proving something to somebody who exists in the brain, somewhere. Making up for a life lost by my father, something like that? I don’t know. A huge number of prime ministers and entrepreneurs have lost a parent by the age of 10…” 

The school where Alec had taught classics, Gresham’s, educated James and his brother Tom free of charge (James also has a sister, Shanie). As an investment, the decision has paid off handsomely. Dyson recently gifted the school £35m, taking his total contributions to the school to more than £50m. (He has also been trying to give a local state primary school £6m for a new science and technology centre, but has been rebuffed by the local council.) His father’s son, the young James liked classics, art and cross-country running. He went to study at the Royal College of Art, but soon discovered he was more interested in industrial design and switched course. 

“I was just after David Hockney and Peter Blake and I’m a bit younger than Norman Foster and Richard Rogers [who died two years ago]. It was a revolutionary time. I was lucky to be in the thick of it and it was an enterprising time. Not so much in industry, unfortunately – there was confidence in pop, rock, fashion and art, but a lack of confidence in industry. It’s strange because we had every reason to be confident. Look at the things we developed in the war and were developing then: the atomic bomb, radar, the Mini, Concorde.” 

He married Deirdre, a successful carpet designer, in 1968 and they went on to have three children. A gallery to house some of their collection – which includes pieces by Hockney and Blake – is under construction near their stately home at Dodington Park, Gloucestershire. Dyson is proud of his lineage in British design. An English Electric Lightning fighter jet – salvaged from a scrapyard and refurbished – is suspended from the ceiling of the canteen at Malmesbury. A Mini Cooper, sawn in half to reveal its cross-section, abuts a wall. 

But Dyson’s most famous work owes at least as much to the visual qualities of pop art as it does to British engineering. There has always been a tension with Dyson between substance and presentation. After college he went to work with the inventor Jeremy Fry, who put him to work designing a flat-bottomed landing craft called the Sea Truck. An example stands outside the Dyson HQ, not far from the boss’s Rolls-Royce. It was all function, a fibreglass vessel designed to enable shore landings without a harbour. It was used by the Egyptian military in the Yom Kippur war. His next key invention was the Ballbarrow, a Dysonified wheelbarrow with a large round ball wheel. The Ballbarrow was popular – it achieved nearly 50 per cent market share – but didn’t make any money for its creator.

By the time Dyson came to work on his vacuum cleaner, he had learnt valuable lessons about design, marketing, pricing and ownership. His research started in 1978, inspired by a centrifugal extraction system in his factory. The machine went through a fabled 5,127 prototypes, during which time Dyson and his young family lived on money borrowed against the family home. He founded Dyson the company in 1991 and launched the first vacuum cleaner two years later. The company was in the black from the start and Dyson owned 100 per cent of it, as he does today. While he profits from his successes – and has the yacht to prove it – he feels the failures, too: most notably his electric vehicle, a project that was conceived in 1993 and was cancelled in 2019 without making it to market, after he decided it was going to be too expensive to go up against the motoring big boys. 

“Raw engineering is very exciting – think of Brunel or Concorde,” he says. “I’m not doing bridges or Concorde. But I like doing an unloved product, like a vacuum cleaner, and making it interesting. I’d like you to feel when you’re using a Dyson it’s like a Ducati motorcycle – that there’s engineering and technology helping you, and you can see it.” 

As with Apple products, all the talk of improved function lets the user feel less guilty about spending money on something that looks cool and costs more than the competition. Whatever else Dyson might be, he is a genius marketeer. There is a feminist aspect to his work, too: he has taken products that were traditionally used by women – vacuum cleaners, hairdryers – and paid them the kind of attention to detail usually reserved for cars or watches.

This may explain why his politics gets such short shrift. It was disappointing to many on the other side of the argument, not all of them Daily Mirror columnists, that James Dyson, debonair feminist inventor in Hockney glasses, turned out to be a Brexiteer. He says he would always have had to move his HQ to Singapore, reflecting the shift in the centre of gravity in the world – the UK is only 4 per cent of his market.

“I knew that to be successful in Asia we had to be partly Asian,” he says. “It sounds sort of a racist thing to say, but we had to understand those markets. They are so often the markets that want the new things first. Their requirements are different and they have a different attitude.” Is there a naivety in Britain about its place in this new world? “Yes, I think so. It’s odd, because Britain was a very international nation and seems often to be less so now.” 

The centre of gravity for his market had already moved to Asia, but the optics of moving the HQ, after arguing for Brexit on the opportunities it might present to manufacturing, were lousy. 

“I tried manufacturing [in the UK],” he says. “I built this factory, I spent hundreds of millions on kit for it. I wanted to make it work. I tried it for seven or eight years and gave it all I had. But our profits were going down, not because of labour costs, because those are the same [in Asia] – in Singapore, they’re much higher – but because of management and bringing all these components in from all over the world. Going abroad and making everything in one place reduced that overhead.