Michael Ashcroft

Michael Anthony Ashcroft, Baron Ashcroft, (born 4 March 1946) is a British-Belizean businessman, pollster and politician.

He is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party.

In 1967, Ashcroft joined Carreras Tobacco as a management trainee.

He left Carreras in 1969, joining Pritchard Services Group, a cleaning and business services company, after several months unemployed.

Ashcroft founded Michael A. Ashcroft Associates in 1972 and was the 132nd richest person in the UK, as ranked by the Sunday Times Rich List 2021, with an estimated fortune of £1.257 billion.

In 1972, at the age of 26, he started his own business, Michael A. Ashcroft Associates, which he used to launch several profitable acquisitions.

Ashcroft's first acquisition was Uni-Kleen – a loss-making cleaning company with 1,000 employees, which he purchased for just £1 in 1974, with a £15,000 bank loan.

He worked to turn the company around, selling it just three years later for £1.3 million.

On exiting Uni-Kleen in 1977, his next purchase was Hawley Goodall, another poorly performing company, this time in camping equipment manufacture.

Ashcroft used Hawley to make a series of acquisitions, transforming the company into a business services group, ranging from janitorial services for hospitals and offices, to car auction services, and later with a focus on the security services industry.

Through the sale of the car auctions division to the fast-expanding British Car Auctions (BCA), he formed a lifelong friendship with David Wickins, whom he would later help take a majority stake in Lotus Cars, as well as provide finance for other joint-ventures.

By 1981, Hawley had made its first acquisitions in the United States, and its total revenues had grown to $27 million.

By early 1983, Hawley had built up a 20% stake in pharmaceutical packaging manufacturer Cope Allman.

Ashcroft offered to increase his stake to 29.9%, just below the 30% level at which a formal bid for the entire company must be launched.

Ashcroft and Cope Allman fought bitterly over the purchase share price and current holdings, with Cope Allman reporting Ashcroft and Wickins to the Takeover panel, after discovering that BCA had built up a 13.5% in the company.

But the takeover panel found that Ashcroft and Wickins were operating independently, so Hawley was able to increase its holding to 29.9%.

At this point the combined holdings of Hawley and BCA in Cope Allman amounted to 43.5%, giving them the power to introduce sweeping changes without launching a full bid.

In 1985 Ashcroft and Wickins bought car sales dealership Henlys Group via a Canadian-registered company, Mipec.

Controlled by Ashcroft's Hawley Goodall, Henlys was merged with the already-owned funeral hearse maker Coleman Milne to form a motoring division.

In 1986, Hawley bought out Ashcroft's former employer, Pritchard Services, leaping to second place in the U.S. services industry.

At this time, Hawley had revenues of more than $1.3 billion.

1987 was a key year for Hawley.

In the early part of the year, it bought Crime Control Inc. based in Indianapolis, for $50 million, placing the company in fourth place in the U.S. security market.

Later in the year it bought ADT Security Services, the largest electronic security company in the United States.

This purchase transformed Hawley into the leading security services business in the United States, and resulted in the majority of its revenues coming from the North American market.

As a result of the acquisition, Bermuda-registered Hawley changed its name to ADT Inc. and decided to refocus its business around security services.

At the end of 1987, the company sold its North American-based facility services business to Denmark's ISS A/S.

In 1987, Ashcroft bought out the existing shareholders of Wickins' BCA via Hawley Goodall.

Based at Blackbushe Airport to allow Wickins access to his treasured aviation division, which flew both Jet Ranger helicopters and Beechcraft King Air turbo prop aircraft, Ashcroft, who has a disliking for such flippant expenditure, immediately sold off the aircraft.

Wickins joined the board of Hawley Goodall, remaining there until the Tyco takeover.

In 1989, Hawley Goodall sold its motoring division consisting of Henlys and Coleman Milne to the Plaxton Group, the bus and coach manufacturer based in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.

He retired from BCA in 1990.

Cope Allman was eventually sold to an MBO backed by Hawley and financed by Bain Capital, and then sold to Bowater in 1992 in a complex swap of assets with ADT/Hawley.

He was created a life peer in 2000, and sat on the Conservative benches of the House of Lords until resigning in 2015.

The Cabinet Office stated that he would take up permanent residence in the UK for tax purposes, but it was reported a decade later that he had not done so.

Ashcroft holds dual British and Belizean nationality, and is a belonger of the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Michael Anthony Ashcroft was born in Chichester, West Sussex.

His father Eric was a British colonial civil servant; Ashcroft spent some of his early years in British Honduras (now Belize) and Malawi.

He was educated at Norwich School, Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, and Mid-Essex Technical College (now Anglia Ruskin University), where he obtained a Higher National Diploma in Business studies.

After a period in Belize after completing his education, Ashcroft returned to hitch hike around Europe, and then for a short period of time became the manager of a rock and roll band.