Meet the Super-Rich Property Mogul Who Just Got Made Reform UK’s New ‘Life President’

Millionaire property tycoon and longtime-Tory donor Sir John Hall defected to Reform UK last month – and straight into the role of the party’s “North East Life President”. This is a completely legitimate sounding position and definitely not a made-up non-job you invent to flatter someone who gave you a reportedly “vast” political donation.

Welcoming the news, party leader Nigel Farage posted on X/Twitter that he was “delighted” with the appointment of the nonagenarian fat cat to the fictitious lifetime position, and called him a “major success story, a role model”.

As his new role was announced, Hall complained of being “a stranger in my own land after 14 years of Conservative rule”, adding that he wants to see Englishness “protected for future generations”.

Hall must take some responsibility for the last 14 years, however. After all, he gave £500,000 to the Tories over a number of years, and was one of the “big names” that bankrolled Theresa May’s disastrous 2017 snap election campaign. He’s on the well-worn path of complaining about the state of the nation whose destroyers he financed.

As an insurgent reactionary force, Reform has become the super-rich’s vehicle of choice. In July, the party appointed multimillionaire founder of a luxury concierge app Zia Yusuf as its chairman after he donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to its election campaign. Richard Tice bankrolled the party for years as part of a journey that took him from an obscure property developer to MP.

And there are now reports that Elon Musk is eyeing ways to sidestep rules about overseas donations to political parties in order to make a $100m “fuck you Starmer payment” to Reform. Farage has said he is unaware of this potential donation, saying: “All I can say is that I’m in touch with him [Musk] and he is very supportive of my policy positions.”

Hall, then, is just one of many rich people taking a punt on Reform. But he’s not just any old fat cat. Hall is the archetypal rightwing populist millionaire: a lad from a mining family who achieved greatness, with a heart of gold – and reactionary politics.

While Hall did well as an estate agent flipping properties in the North East in the 1970s,  his big break came in the early 1980s. As Margaret Thatcher ushered in the age of neoliberalism, he took advantage of one of Thatcher’s low-tax “enterprise zones” to build the MetroCentre – at the time the biggest out-of-town shopping centre in Europe – on a former ash dump, known locally as “a great big clarty field”.

Upon its opening, Thatcher herself sent a message of congratulation, calling it an “impossible dream” that had become a reality. In turn, Hall made his admiration for Thatcher clear. On her death, he said: “Mrs Thatcher took away union power and gave us something back instead, she gave us the power to do things. The MetroCentre here in Gateshead is an excellent example of this, she created the enterprise zone and brought with her a new spirit.” You lose your collective power in the workplace, but you gain a shiny new shopping mall. Comme ci, comme ca.

Hall then profited a second time as he found a way to commodify a sense of identity in a region which had been robbed of it. In 1992, he bought Newcastle United football club as it flirted with relegation to the third tier of English football and reinvented it as a premier league big dog, spending a world transfer-record breaking £15m to bring in Alan Shearer to bang in the goals.

Hall’s vision was to create a city-wide sports club encompassing rugby, basketball, athletics, golf and motor racing, all under the umbrella of Newcastle United Sporting Club, modelled after the sporting clubs of Barcelona and Lisbon. His plans didn’t quite work out, but he was named “Mr Newcastle” in the press for his efforts to revitalise the Geordie nation.

The revival wasn’t cheap. Ticket prices rocketed and the club became a cash cow for the family – the Halls made almost a hundred million out of the club. Hall’s son Douglas had to apologise after allegedly portraying fans as mugs for paying too much for replica shirts, as well as calling Newcastle women “dogs”, in comments made to Mazher Mahmood, the News of the World’s so-called “fake sheikh”, who posed as a middle eastern businessman as part of a sting. Hall claimed he was a victim of “entrapment”.

Ironically, given his current political allegiances and concern with a lost sense of Englishness, Hall was relaxed about the changing face of modern football. He welcomed a landmark 1995 ruling which extended the free movement of labour for professional footballers within the EU. The so-called Bosman ruling was hailed as affording players more rights, gave rise to the agent and helped usher in football’s modern era of teams packed with foreign players, sky-high wages and domination by rich clubs.

“We should not be afraid of change”, Hall said at the time. “The game is changing and football will adjust. Freedom of movement won’t change the transfer system fundamentally. It will, however, put a check on huge transfer fees.”

The toon army have mixed memories of Hall, unlike his successor Mike Ashley, the Sports Direct boss who was generally cast as a cockney wideboy who asset-stripped the club. But Hall’s reign wasn’t entirely positive for the city.

In 1996, Hall wanted to build a bigger stadium for Newcastle United on a unique city-centre park and ancient moorland. The Labour council rejected the plans and offered 13 other sites. Hall threatened to move south across the Tyne to Gateshead. In the end, the plans were shelved, and St James’s Park was expanded instead. But, as one journalist observed at the time, “Hall’s operating methods had been made disconcertingly clear. Obstructed for a moment, the self-styled king of ‘the Geordie nation’ had threatened to take his court elsewhere.”

A 1994 profile in the Independent newspaper summed up Hall’s character, noting that “his extreme rightwing opinions (he is virulently anti-gay, for instance) are modified by an old-fashioned sense of the obligations that accrue to the powerful and successful.” It appears that in his old age he feels obliged to foist his opinions on the rest of us, via his extreme wealth.

Hall’s defection would appear to bring to an end a period of political shopping around. He backed Reform at the July election and then came back to the Conservatives to support Robert Jenrick’s bitterly anti-migrant leadership campaign – a move that was reported as a “disaster” for Farage in the rightwing Express. Jenrick lost, and Hall’s leap to Reform was announced in a Sun exclusive as a “blow” to new Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.

As Hall’s case shows, the rise of Reform UK gives crotchety old rightwing millionaires a bit of consumer choice. The Tories no longer have a monopoly – something all good capitalists should surely welcome.