It was the unedifying sight of Rachel Reeves struggling to book an open return to Leeds on her own laptop that convinced Gary Lubner that the Labour Party could do with his money.
In late 2021, when this understated South African was still chief executive of Belron, the firm that repairs windscreens the world over, he fell into conversation with Sir Keir Starmer’s shadow chancellor at a dinner for business leaders. Back then Labour were miles behind in the polls but Lubner liked what he heard. A few weeks later he went to meet Reeves in parliament and saw for himself the shoestring reality of life in opposition.
“She said: ‘Gary, I’m really sorry. I’m going to Leeds tonight, and I’ve got to book my train ticket,” Lubner, still incredulous, recalls now, in a strong South African accent undiluted by 35 years in London. “Are you serious? Do you not have a PA or someone that does it? ‘No, no, no,’ she said. I said: well, can I help with that? And that was really how it started.”
“It” is one of the only remaining untold stories of Labour’s rise to power: how Lubner, a car glass tycoon who shuns publicity, became indispensable to Starmer, Reeves and Morgan McSweeney, the architect of their landslide victory last July. The £42,000 he paid to hire a personal assistant for the woman who is now chancellor has since become more than £5 million in donations to the Labour Party, and much more to other organisations on the progressive left.
For a party that long subsisted on membership fees and donations from trade unions, these are incomprehensibly big numbers. But thanks to Lubner, Labour is getting used to them. These sums are pocket change to a man whose long career in business made him serious money — discretion and an unmistakable air of embarrassment stop him from telling me how much, but Lubner is worth hundreds of millions of pounds that will, for as long as it wants them, put Labour on a level playing field with the Tories and Reform.
If you didn’t know this already, you would struggle to guess from meeting Lubner. He dresses in the unshowy uniform of every balding dad in late middle age — jacket, tieless shirt and a pair of sensible trousers. Offices like his, a converted 18th-century townhouse in Marylebone, do not come cheap, but he comes downstairs to greet me at reception himself. He wears his wealth lightly in everything but his ambition. “I don’t want to reach tens or even hundreds of people,” he tells me as we climb a sweeping stone staircase. “I want to change the lives of millions of people. And you can only do that when you’re working with the government, and that’s what we do.”
He certainly has the money to do it: Lubner says he intends to support Labour to win the next election, and then the election after that. After a long and ignominious history of private donations that come with too many strings and too much controversy attached — think Harold Wilson’s Lavender List, Tony Blair’s brushes with Bernie Ecclestone and Lord Levy or Lord Alli’s ready supply of designer suits and glasses — Starmer has stumbled across something unique. Lubner wants to give away “more than 95 per cent” of his wealth to good causes, of which Labour is but one, and professes to want nothing in return. His three children, he insists, will not become millionaires when he dies.
“The thing about Gary people find difficult to understand,” says a friend of the prime minister, “is that he is the closest thing there is to a straightforwardly good person in politics. He doesn’t want profile. He doesn’t want to influence policy. He doesn’t want a peerage.” I spend almost all of my time listening to the Labour Party litigate the tiniest differences of opinion in the most viciously personal terms and to hear someone’s character endorsed like this is rare. But everybody does: cabinet ministers, their special advisers, the heads of the think-tanks that run on Lubner’s money. But even now, four years after his first encounter with Reeves (he met Starmer a year later), nobody can quite explain what, if anything, he does want.
Clues are all around us when we meet. He points out a signed picture of him laughing with Nelson Mandela, who invited Lubner onto the board of his charity in the 1990s. His voice cracks as he tells me of their friendship. “I spent quite a lot of time with him. He used to come over. I used to take my kids to meet him … Mandela loved kids. He had been without kids for 27 years, so he just loved being with kids.”
Also in pride of place is a poster of a West Ham squad from a 1970s issue of Shoot! magazine. Following football on television was impossible when Lubner, whose Jewish grandparents came to South Africa to escape persecution in Eastern Europe, was growing up in a comfortable home in apartheid Johannesburg. Old copies of Shoot! arriving weeks late and the BBC World Service were all he and his brother had.
He picked West Ham when he saw this photograph as a boy, pointing to the Bermudian striker Clyde Best, one of only two black faces in the squad. “It was all about this guy. We never knew that different races could play together.”
As a boy, Lubner was insulated from the realities of apartheid by his family’s money and the colour of his skin. His almost permanent smile tightens into a grimace. “You lived in separate suburbs, you went to a white school, you mixed with people — other than domestic servants or labourers, you never really came across black people. So we grew up in this slightly idyllic life, knowing that charity and giving back was part of that, but it wasn’t really politicised.” Like many industrialists, his father Ronnie and uncle Bertie knew PW Botha, the president who oversaw apartheid in the 1980s, and once donated to his National Party in the 1980s. His successor FW de Klerk, who released Mandela, said in 2017 that the Lubners “did not support apartheid, they supported the abolition of apartheid”.
Lubner’s critics have raked up his family history in search of something to delegitimise him. That has cost at least one left-wing website a substantial sum in libel damages, which went to the World Central Kitchen — the humanitarian charity which has served hundreds of thousands of meals in Gaza — and the Community Security Trust for British Jews. Unsurprisingly, he defends his family, who, like many Jews of their generation, gave generously to charity: “Did they go through a journey? Absolutely, they did, as did 99 per cent of most white people in South Africa.” Ronnie and Bertie later became close to Mandela, whose name brings tears to Lubner’s eyes. “People were pragmatic, and look, I wasn’t around … the ideas of the sins of the fathers I find quite abhorrent.”
Lubner reached his own conclusions as a teenager. After leaving his state secondary school his conscription forms arrived. Given the option of the army, navy, air force or police, he picked the police. He and his colleagues, he says, were “the sharp arrow of apartheid enforcement”. Any comfortable illusions he had about his home country vanished in an instant: posted to Parkview police station in Johannesburg, he found himself enforcing the pass laws that imposed strict segregation on black South Africans. This, he says now, was a duty he did all he could to ignore, falsifying paperwork to process cases without imposing punishment. “I made a very clear choice early on in the police force that I was going to do everything that I could to effectively go against the apartheid system.” He recalls running ahead of his colleagues on raids and warning potential arrestees to flee.
Lubner admits it is only too easy for white South Africans to claim they were against apartheid now. He is at pains not to overstate the extent of his resistance. “I feel like a bit of a fraud in the sense that there were people who I knew very well, people who were murdered, people who were tortured … people who really literally put their life on the line to bring about the end of apartheid. I can’t claim that, and I don’t pretend to. I tried to do my little bit, and I decided by being in a position of power and influence as a South African white policeman, that actually there was quite a lot I could do to disrupt what was going on.” Later, studying accountancy at the University of Cape Town, he could see Robben Island from campus, and went on to co-found Jews For Social Justice, an anti-apartheid group. “I know now that the Jewish community says we were very much on the side of anti-apartheid, I can tell you quite categorically: they were not.”
In 1988, Lubner came to London to study for an MBA. Two years earlier, Spitting Image had captured the zeitgeist with I’ve Never Met A Nice South African, and he was so embarrassed to be one that he told the taxi drivers who took him to West Ham that he was from Zimbabwe or Swaziland instead. He has been in Britain ever since, and no longer has a South African passport. In 1991 he joined Belron, best known in the UK for its Autoglass chain of windscreen repairers. He recalls, through gritted teeth, turning down a sponsorship deal with West Ham to put the firm’s name on Chelsea’s shirts instead, but his fondest memories are of employees of every colour rubbing along without fuss. “I remember our workforce: incredibly diverse, full of immigrants, full of classic working class people … everyone got on.” He is now funding asylum and refugee charities and social cohesion projects in provincial towns such as Grimsby in the hope of seeing the same spirit return to an unhappy country.
Over the next three decades, windscreens made Lubner an extremely wealthy man. After 23 years as Belron’s chief executive, he retired in 2023. His last act was to give every employee a no-questions-asked payout of €10,000 from the shares he persuaded his fellow executives to give up with him. Now he is trying to get rid of the rest, and sees his political donations as something of a sideshow to the philanthropy he is proudest of: his funding of early years charities in South Africa. I wonder if a word that’s so integral to Judaism — atonement — might explain it. “I don’t think it’s atonement, but I have this deep obligation that I want to help the country that helped me to get where I’ve got to … I had free education, I had an unbelievable university education, but I had all of that because I was white.”
About 70 per cent of the money given by This Day, his charitable foundation, goes to projects in South Africa. The rest is spent in Britain: mostly on social cohesion initiatives like the Bloomsbury Football Foundation, which supports 4,000 young Londoners, and Our Second Home, a youth movement for refugees and asylum seekers. A smaller portion of his cash is already changing our domestic politics. Lubner has voted Labour in every general election since his emigration — apart from 2019, when the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister was too much to bear. His money is sustaining a network of left-wing organisations he likes to call “the ecosystem”: the think-tanks and campaign groups such as Labour Together, the Future Governance Forum and UCL Policy Lab whose work invariably ends up in desks in Downing Street. When Starmer was in opposition, their leaders would meet in one of Lubner’s properties not far from here, or meet other donors over breakfast at his home. The Observer, recently sold by The Guardian to Tortoise Media, is another one of his investments — and its first front page under new management is already framed by his desk.
With the government’s polling tumbling and Nigel Farage setting the agenda, I ask if Lubner thinks it’s still worth it. But he still believes in Starmer, who has been his man since they first met in 2022. “He sat and he really listened. I was just taken by the fact that he was a lawyer, you know: he was sitting there, taking notes, listening to every point and answering every point.” Nor is his faith wavering in the “very, very impressive” Morgan McSweeney, whose electoral strategy has seen Labour take a hard line on immigration that horrifies the liberal left. Surely Lubner, who is giving away his kids’ inheritance to refugee charities, doesn’t like that?
“I know his values,” Lubner says of the prime minister. “I know he believes in the same things that I do … would I have liked more to happen? Of course, but I’m never going to agree with every single thing, and I never intended to. So am I disappointed? I’m not disappointed. My support for Labour is long-term. I want them to be in power for the next term, and hopefully the term after that.”
