How an Essex Grocer Became Britain’s Most Influential Political Figure

The former Apprentice star Thomas Skinner, who was invited to a barbecue by JD Vance, speaks for an increasingly prominent type of voter. The Telegraph has more.

“Former Apprentice star Tom Skinner meets JD Vance” ran the headlines, reporting what may once have seemed an improbable encounter. A British reality TV star hanging out with the US vice-president? It would have been hard to imagine, say, Dick Cheney having a pint with some bloke off Big Brother. But when a former Apprentice star occupies the White House, perhaps all bets are off.

So who is Skinner and how did he – and not the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch – end up at a barbecue with Vance this week in the Cotswolds, where the Vice-President is spending his holiday at a Grade II-listed manor house?

Born in 1991 in Romford, east London, Skinner began working as a local market trader at the age of 16. In 2019, he entered the public consciousness as a bouncy 28-year-old contestant on the BBC business-based reality show, at which point he was a pillow salesman. Fired by Lord Sugar in week nine of the show, he has since appeared on other shows, including 8 Out of 10 Cats and Celebrity MasterChef, and accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. There, he posts videos of himself tucking into huge plates of heart-attack food and doling out motivational asides. “It doesn’t matter how big those steps are you’re taking as long as they’re in the right direction,” he tells his followers. And elsewhere: “We’re gonna give it 110% and we ain’t gonna go home until we are proud.”

The day job to which he gives his own 110% continues to be pillow-related: he’s listed by Companies House as director of The Fluffy Pillow Company, a mattress, bed and pillow specialist, having resigned in 2022 as director of Bosh Beds (which is now dissolved).

A grafter, in the parlance of today’s Conservatives; an entrepreneurial Essex Man in the parlance of Thatcher’s Britain. Think Del Boy crossed with Jamie Oliver (in his pre-Turkey Twizzlers era), as liberal with his gravy as he is with his catchphrases: “lovely jubbly”, “the guv’nor” and his customary sign-off, “bosh”.

Apprentice viewers warmed to him, while Lord Sugar praised his “honourability” and “say it as it is” character. In a war, he would be someone you’d want with you in the trenches, said the business magnate as he fired him, hinting at something solid and decent about him.

In Skinner’s own words, it is all about “family, hard work and good times”.

In the words of Dr James Orr, associate professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge and champion of Skinner: “He’s a very busy man. He’s up at 3.30am grafting, going for those revolting breakfasts, gets in his van, drives around the South East delivering mattresses, has a cheeky pint at his local.”

It was Orr who match-made him with Vance, having earlier identified something in Skinner, 34, that he felt deserved a wider audience. Behind the cheeky chappy persona was someone, he felt, who was “England incarnate”: a patriotic, straight-talking family man with the kind of face William the Conqueror might have stared at in 1066.

“There’s something timelessly English about him,” says Orr, rejecting the idea that his appeal may be rooted to some extent in nostalgia for a vanishing imagined England of pints down the local and Sunday roasts. “It’s the energy, the sunny optimism, the authenticity. And maybe,” he concedes, “a glimpse into what’s been lost.”

It was earlier this year that Orr made his approach. He was organising a London conference called Now and England for the Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation and decided, as he puts it, that “we had too many wonks, eggheads, politicians, and nobody who could speak of England”.

At a conference about England, this presented a problem. But Orr had seen a couple of Skinner’s videos and concluded that he was the answer: “I thought, ‘this guy is Romford on legs and I want him at this conference’.”

He rang Skinner every day for six weeks and was rewarded with silence. Eventually, though, his perseverance paid off and Skinner agreed to attend.

“He came to the conference and gave a barnstorming speech, and what was so powerful about it was it wasn’t political, wasn’t point-scoring, wasn’t having jabs at the Government or Opposition,” says Orr. “He talked in a straightforward and emotionally powerful way about his love of England.”

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