Piers Corbyn — City tycoon

I can’t help but think that Mr and Mrs Corbyn have a lot to answer for. As Oscar Wilde might have put it: to have one disreputable child may be regarded as a misfortune, to have two looks like carelessness. At last Saturday’s unruly, 50-strong demonstration against the lockdown at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, Piers Corbyn — older brother of the better-known Jeremy — was arrested along with 19 other protesters. He had been wielding a megaphone, describing media coverage of the coronavirus as “a pack of lies to brainwash you and keep you in order” — a conspiracy theory worthy of that craziest of all conspiracists. It was a “fake virus” and social distancing rules were a form of “tyranny”, according to Piers et al.

I had to have a little smile to myself, though. Because to be honest, old Piers wasn’t always so bad. I met him back in the old days, otherwise known as 1997, when I went to interview him for a feature for the Daily Mail. The picture above shows him in the late seventies and he wasn’t much different when I met him. My abiding memory is of an archetypal English eccentric, a “nutty professor” and rather likeable, if a tad physically off-putting. To refresh my memory I excavated the ancient cutting from my files and read it.

Piers Corbyn was making headlines at the time because — curiously for a former far-left Labour activist — he had just become very rich indeed. A talented astrophysicist, he had discovered a formula for making accurate long-range weather predictions by monitoring the activities of the sun (magnetic changes, solar flares, sunspots etc), having long suspected that such phenomena affect our earthly weather conditions. He founded a company to market this valuable data to all kinds of businesses whose profits could be boosted by knowing months in advance what the weather will be like, e.g. clothing retailers and manufacturers, gas and electricity providers. He now had hundreds of clients and his company was about to float on the Stock Exchange, turning his 51 per cent ownership of it into £2.7 million-worth of shares. The nutty professor and one-time scourge of the Establishment had morphed into a City tycoon.

Yet, as I wrote at the time: “Self-effacing and quietly spoken, the tee-total, non-smoking vegetarian has been living in the same council flat on London’s seedy Old Kent Road for 21 years. He drives a modest Nissan Micra. He has no plans to change his home or his car.” I went on: “Like all academics, from Einstein downwards, he is a sartorial disaster area. A threadbare blue suit hangs limply from his bony frame, covering up a sweater which has two gaping holes at the elbows. His battered shoes are a clashing brown.” Later we have lunch together in his office canteen: “As he tucks into his cheese omelette, stray bits of egg add colour to his grizzly, greying beard.” He was a real character alright, and I enjoyed our meeting.

It was a good story too. He told me about his comfortable middle-class upbringing in Wiltshire, his constantly inquiring scientific mind even as a child: “While other kids were out riding bikes, I was inventing instruments for measuring rainwater and conducting experiments in soil density.” There is no doubting his intellectual capabilities. After a grammar school education he won a scholarship to read physics at Imperial College London, emerging in 1968 with a First (despite spending much of his time in student agit-prop activities, organising sit-ins and demos and locking teachers out of their classrooms). He later got a second degree, in astrophysics, which led to his deeper interest in the weather, and so the whole sunspot business began.

I asked Piers what his brother Jeremy had to say about his newly-acquired status as a millionaire businessman. Surely the die-hard socialist couldn’t approve of a fat-cat brother? In response Piers admitted, almost sheepishly, that he had no idea what the MP thought, as they hadn’t been on speaking terms for years. Apparently there had been some kind of falling out. “I doubt whether he is interested in my stocks and shares,” he concluded.

It was all so long ago and I’ve no idea what became of Piers’s weather-forecasting company, or whether he is still living in the pokey council flat on the Old Kent Road. I hadn’t thought about him for decades until, sometime last year, I heard him speaking up in support of his Labour Leader brother during the Party’s notorious anti-Semitism scandal. Piers claimed that the whole thing was a put-up job by the Jeremy’s “enemies”, to tarnish his reputation. (I guess the brothers must have patched up their earlier differences.) But he was clearly very wide of the mark; his paranoid line was straight out of the Diane Abbott playbook, now consigned to history’s dustbin.

Jeremy Corbyn has learnt nothing about the world in the past half-century. It is often remarked that he is stuck in a time-warp of the inane radical-left student politics of the seventies. But Piers — he’s gone somewhere even more distant and bizarre. They say that one gets wiser with age. But it ain’t necessarily so.