Varun Chandra: the most important adviser you've never heard of

Spectator

30-07-2025

The porousness of the Establishment, and its reluctance to advertise its activities, are illustrated by the career of Varun Chandra. At the age of 40, he sits as business adviser at the right hand of the Prime Minister, accompanied him to the meeting on Monday with Donald Trump at Turnberry, and is credited with playing an invaluable role in the recent trade talks in Washington. Before the general election, he used his innumerable high-level contacts to persuade business that Labour would be a better bet than the Conservatives.
About himself he has preserved an almost immaculate discretion. He has no Wikipedia entry and is not in Who's Who. Almost everyone consulted in the writing of this profile either does not know him – this includes a number of the best young authorities on the Labour party – or else offered bland testimony about what a wonderful man he is.
Chandra himself is not bland, as one discovers by listening to his performance on Principal Navigations, the podcast of the firm Hakluyt, which he ran until he joined Keir Starmer in Downing Street after the general election. He began with his boyhood in South Shields: 'It is a lovely little seaside town in the north-east of England. It is also very poor… My parents ended up moving there before I was born, from Bihar… the poorest state in India, basically… My father came from almost a subsistence peasant existence in a little village, no running water, no electricity, would walk to school, 12 miles every day, and he worked his way up, did well at school, qualified as a doctor… came over to the UK when the NHS was looking for doctors.'
In his early years in England his father 'suffered a lot of racism, didn't know how to socialise, didn't know how to go for a drink and talk about the rugby and the football and that sort of stuff, so he's passed over', and had to accept posts as a locum far from home. His mother, anxious to contribute to the family budget, went from café to café trying to sell samosas, and was rebuffed. Varun, born in 1984, knew his parents were making sacrifices so he and his sister could have a better life, and felt he must 'make the most of every opportunity'.
He went to the independent Royal Grammar School in Newcastle, founded in 1525. At this point he had a thick Geordie accent, but was 'saved' by his English teacher who 'made what I had said sound clever and sound thoughtful'. One former fellow pupil tells me: 'My recollection of Varun at school is very much as he is in his career today – whip-smart, and hugely charming with it, which is a killer combination. He's the kind of bloke you can't help but like, and he pays full and engaged attention to whoever's talking to him, so it feels reciprocated. He's probably one of the most accomplished people in the entire government, cabinet ministers included.'
Varun won a place at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics, was elected president of the Junior Common Room, played cricket, rugby, hockey and football for the college, and met Emma Jenkinson, from Swansea. She was reading history and politics, and on New Year's Day 2013 they were married. At Magdalen he began to learn the ways of the world: what the Foreign Office is, what a bank is, the existence of schools like Westminster, Winchester and Eton where 'everybody knows each other'. He says: 'It wasn't intimidating, it was fascinating, learning how the British Establishment operates.'
From Magdalen, Chandra joined a bank, Lehman Brothers, because the starting salary enabled him to put a deposit down on a flat and get a mortgage, which he wanted very much to tell his parents he had done. But he looked at the senior people in the bank, decided he did not wish to be doing what they were doing, and resigned about a week before 15 September 2008, when to general astonishment Lehman went bust. Chandra heard from a friend of a friend who had gone to work for one of Tony Blair's charities that the former prime minister was looking for a young banker to help expand his commercial activities.
On his first day in the new job Blair asked him to explain 'this whole financial crisis thing, could you just walk me through leverage'. Chandra says of Blair: 'He treats everyone with absolute respect and decency and humility… [it was] a real education in how one should conduct oneself.' This kind of praise is odious to the British press. We feel it must be covering up all sorts of misdemeanours. But to understand Blair, and his apprentice Chandra, one must bear in mind their overpowering need to know that, despite their riches, they are still decent people, who strive by political action and charitable engagement to justify their good fortune.
Chandra spent five-and-a-half years flying around the world for Blair, meeting presidents, prime ministers and billionaires. In the run-up to the 2010 general election, he wrote 20 pieces on economic questions for Left Foot Forward, a blog founded by Will Straw, son of the Labour minister Jack Straw. We find Chandra in a prosy tone rebuking George Osborne and Kenneth Clarke for 'playing politics'. One has the impression he is trying out journalism and discovering he has no particular gift for it. When David Miliband stood for the Labour leadership in 2010, Chandra advised him on economics.
Chandra joined Hakluyt in 2013, when he was 28. Hakluyt had been founded in 1995 by two former MI6 officers, Christopher James and Mike Reynolds, who spotted a gap in the market for business intelligence. Suppose you run a company which constructs power stations, you hear of an opportunity to build one in Ruritania, and you need to know whether your local partner is reliable or will get you into trouble. Hakluyt would find out the answer for you, without telling you how it did so.
After a spell in the New York office, Chandra was in 2019 elected managing partner of Hakluyt, whose headquarters are in a townhouse in Mayfair. The company charges very high fees and has expanded at a rate of knots, with Chandra paid about £2 million in his last year. 'They do themselves well,' one who has dined in the townhouse attests. 'There is still a very spook-y atmosphere.' He also detected hints of a top barrister's chambers and a high-class bordello.
Chandra has insisted that while he was in charge there was 'no relationship with the spook-y world, so that's that'. Hakluyt partners go in and out of senior Whitehall roles at sometimes dizzying speed, and the company's international board is chaired by Lord Hague, former foreign secretary and a Magdalen man. Chandra appears in the photograph of Boris Johnson and others drinking wine in the Downing Street garden on the evening of 15 May 2020, though he was not at the same table as Johnson, and explains that he was visiting civil servants. Last month, openDemocracy published an account of a breakfast organised by Chandra in April 2022 at Hakluyt's headquarters in Mayfair, at which the then business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, met ten financiers including representatives of Macquarie, the Australian asset manager, Global Infrastructure Partners, which is owned by BlackRock, and the private equity firms KKR and Permira. Chandra insists Hakluyt provides its clients with 'unbiased, independent, high-quality advice' and does not engage in lobbying. It certainly appears to help its clients meet whoever is in power.
Lord Rosenfield, who served from 2016 as a partner at Hakluyt and had an unhappy spell as Johnson's chief of staff, hailed Chandra's appointment as Starmer's business adviser with the perhaps premature declaration on LinkedIn: 'Our economy is safe in your hands!'
The awkward task of persuading business not to give up on this Labour government falls to Chandra. If you are a financier in New York who doubts whether now is quite the moment to invest in Thames Water, you will find yourself talking to Chandra. One British businessman objects that Chandra 'has never run a proper business' and knows nothing of what it is like to work on tight margins. Chandra's ability to work a room is, however, generally admitted.
When Henry Fairlie brought the term 'the Establishment' into general use, in a column for The Spectator in 1955, he remarked: 'The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognised that it is exercised socially.' Blair was brilliant at the social exercise of power, for he knew, as an old friend of his once observed, how to talk to anyone from a duchess to a cleaning lady. After about ten years we got so fed up with Blair we would not listen to a word he said, but for a long time he indicated to Middle England that he was a decent chap, by adopting the right tone of voice for whatever was going on.
A number of Blairites, including Peter Mandelson and Jonathan Powell, have rallied round to help Starmer, whose command of tone is much less sure. Chandra is the youngest of these recruits. If anyone can mend fences with business, he can. But mending fences with Middle England is a front-of-house job, which may be beyond the wit even of the man from Hakluyt.