Frank Hester's working practices are more gruesome than his jokes
The gags were bad, but imagine working for the guy
Frank Hester seems to run an unpleasant company. At the Phoenix Partnership staff are told not to touch glass doors, lest they leave fingerprints. If they are late they must shout an apology to the room. And they must also live within a certain radius of the office, so that Hester can order them in at short notice.
But more importantly, it seems, he also said some obnoxious stuff about the ex-Labour but currently independent MP Diane Abbott. That’s the story that’s dominated the Westminster news agenda this week, even catching the attention of the New York Times, keeper of the 18th century tradition of American Anglophobia.
While it may mostly be shock value, there is a slither of public interest to justify it. Hester is the Conservatives’ biggest ever donor, having given the party £10m1. For context, the total donations to all British political parties last year was £93m, which is to say that Hester’s money would have been earmarked as a big chunk of the Tories’ general election campaign fund.
That plan seems in some jeopardy though. Interest about the story is sufficiently high that newspapers which would normally euphemise any language with a whiff of bigotry have relayed the comments in full. According to the Guardian, which broke the story, Hester was discussing another organisation’s ‘executive’ in a private meeting when he came out with this:
“She’s shit. She’s the shittest person. Honestly I try not to be sexist but when I meet somebody like [the executive], I just […] It’s like trying not to be racist but you see Diane Abbott on the TV and you’re just like, I hate, you just want to hate all black women because she’s there, and I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot.”
It’s an exchange that makes Hester sound like a semi-lapsed alcoholic, desperate to wean himself off the Jim Davidson jokes but unable to stop them slipping out in a Tourette’s-style outburst.
By his own admission, the software engineer makes “a lot of jokes about racism, about our different creeds and cultures”. The Graun also quoted gags about Indians sitting on train roofs for lack of space, and a group of Chinese colleagues who sit together being branded “Asian corner”.
I expect many people would know the type: a middle-age man moulded by a time where such humour was more widely tolerated. Such people span the gap between cringe and liability, though they are a useful rebuke to the hideous HR decree for staff to ‘bring your whole self to work’. The distinction between professional and personal lives is an essential one.
And yet, calling any of this, as Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti has done “terrifying hate speech”, is a little over the top. Is anyone honestly scared by what this man said in a private meeting in 2019? Are the crass, offensive comments “frightening”, as Abbott puts it, from a fat dork with what TikTok might call ‘big divorced dad energy’?
Come on, the answer is no. There is no reason to believe that Hester had murderous designs on Abbott. At least one relative of mine used to call for politicians to be shot with such regularity you’d need a full-time firing squad to carry out the executions. The most plausible read is that Hester was joking – ineptly, stupidly, but still joking.
And so most of the outrage about what he said is some mix of confected or an excuse to talk about something else. It is a pantomime on identity politics, started by the Guardian when they published the story2, followed up by the left in their competition to be most extravagantly offended by it, then made farcical by the Conservatives employing the deny, downplay, concede method for keeping a story alive for several days rather than one.
Even Hester fished heroically for his own story of oppression, saying through his Twitter account that: “The Guardian is right when it quotes Frank saying he abhors racism, not least because he experienced it as the child of Irish immigrants in the 1970s.”3
This is all good knockabout. Had the story come to me I’d have run it with glee, happy to feed the narrative that the Conservative party is both run and funded by fruitcakes, loonies and not-so-closeted racists. Were my readership largely anti-Tory, I’d have also delighted in knowing it could financially hurt my political opponents.
But to me Hester’s greater offence is his authoritarian approach to running a company. And to its credit, the Guardian covered this in plenty of detail.
Phoenix’s employee handbook is finickity enough to stipulate how you should raise your hand in a meeting, in what they term ‘Phoenix hands’ without dying of embarrassment. The company also tells people not to hover near meeting doors, and to avoid phrases such as ‘sorry to interrupt’ or ‘could I bother you’ when interrupting or bothering people. Other things that are banned include yawning or daydreaming during conversations, eating sandwiches al desko, and using mobile phones or smartwatch messaging in the office.
Worse than this are the humiliating rules on confessing mistakes. At one point this involved a public announcement of your error across the office and via email. And if there was an error in your apology, this could be followed by further acts of penance.
Fairness obliges me to note that Phoenix perks included early finishes on Fridays, an encouragement to take holidays, bar tabs, and large salaries. But the overall impression from the Guardian piece, and some of the frankly incredible Glassdoor reviews, is that Hester is running a fascist regime on the outskirts of Leeds.
Much like the Yorkshire mills of old, Hester has built a machine for churning up and spitting out grads. And were I taking political donations from such a figure, I’d be much more concerned with the allegations of staff abuse than the man’s coarse sense of humour.
The press hasn’t been shy of late in crucifying various business moguls for treating their staff poorly. But in a straight contest, offensive speech tends to take up more oxygen, especially when it concerns an MP who has generated plenty of controversy herself for saying things that should be regarded as racist.
I cannot blame Keir Starmer for not fishing Rishi Sunak out the sea when there’s blood in the water and the sharks are circling. But the red team does call itself the Labour party for a reason. Hester’s gags were bad, but they sound much more tolerable than actually working for the guy.
I was surprised how low this figure was for a record donation, but I suppose that in aristocratic times politicians were expected to fund themselves.
A sidebar: but if Hester’s comments really do incite hatred, it is the Guardian most to blame for publicising them, not him for making them to a group of colleagues.
Abbott has form on the issue of anti-Irish prejudice, having lost the Labour whip last year for claiming in a letter to the Guardian that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people suffer from prejudice rather than racism. Putting aside the strange examples she used (pre-civil rights America, apartheid South Africa and the era of chattel slavery) and haggling over definitions, I think she’s correct that people who look white are less exposed to racism than those who don’t. Assuming that’s the point she wanted to make.
The thing is, Diane Abbot is shit. The Nick Ferrari interview proves that.
Do I want her shot though? Not a chance. Does she make me hate Black women. Not a chance.
He's another one who's engaged his mouth before his brain and it's cost him.