The Left has a long history of catastrophic financial errors – Reeves is about to follow suit
The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust, an endowment now valued at around £1.3bn, whose purpose is to keep the paper going in perpetuity. Much of this money originates from the sale of what started off as a car listings magazine, and then became an online marketplace, Autotrader.
The Guardian Media Group sold 49.9pc of Autotrader's parent, Trader Media Group, to private equity firm, Apax, for £675m in 2007 – and the remaining 50.1pc to it for around £700m in 2014.
This may at first sound like a brilliant deal. The Guardian's initial decision to invest in Autotrader certainly was a wise one. But the deal looks rather less great if you take a look at Autotrader's current valuation.
Apax floated the Auto Trader Group on the London Stock Exchange in 2015 with an initial market capitalisation of around £2bn. It now stands at nearly £7.3bn, and many commentators, including The Telegraph's own Questor column, think the company is still undervalued.
It is rather delicious that The Guardian's net zero zealots owe the paper's survival to a site flogging cars – it certainly isn't down to the paper's own profitability. The paper lost nearly £25m in the year to March 2025, and £37m the year before. But just think how much more greenery and tax hiking the paper could push if its endowment was not £1.3bn, but over £7bn.
Unite, one of Britain's largest unions with around 1.2 million members and a Labour Party affiliate, has done rather worse with its own assets, as an interim internal report revealed last week.
Under its previous general secretary, Len McCluskey – a staunch socialist and champion of Jeremy Corbyn – the union spent over £110m on a hotel and conference centre, the Aloft Birmingham Eastside – but the building is only valued at £35m.
The report states that the cost of drilling holes in blockwork walls was estimated at £91,000, but was charged at £1.3m. The union has not submitted a full annual return to the Certification Officer, a legal requirement, since 2020.
Unite would perhaps have been better off if it had shunned capitalist enterprise in practice, as well as in theory, and avoided going into business altogether.
On a national scale, Gordon Brown's decision as chancellor to reduce the nation's gold holdings was a truly appalling commercial choice. Between 1999 and 2002, the Treasury sold 401 tons of gold, reducing the UK's strategic reserve from 715 tons in 1999 to around 314 tons in 2003.
The sale price averaged at $275 per ounce and brought in a total of around $3.5bn (£2.7bn). The gold price, generally quoted in US dollars, now stands at over $3,300 per ounce. The holdings sold by Brown would now be worth over $42bn, or over £31bn – tenfold what Brown brought in.
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