David Ivor Young

David Ivor Young     (politician, businessman)
Born	27 February 1932 Finchley, United Kingdom
Died	9 December 2022 (Age 90)
Nationality	UK
Ethnicity	Jewish
Alma mater	University College London
Siblings	Stuart Young
Member of	Bruges Group
Party	Conservative
UK politician and right-hand man to Thatcher during the controversial state privatisations of the 1980s, and attended the 1985 and 1986 Bilderberg meetings when mooted as possible future PM.  Secretary of State for Trade and Industry  In office 13 June 1987 - 24 July 1989 Preceded by Paul Channon Succeeded by Nicholas Ridley  Secretary of State for Employment  In office 2 September 1985 - 13 June 1987 Preceded by Tom King  Minister without Portfolio  In office 11 September 1984 - 2 September 1985  Member of the House of Lords  In office 10 October 1984 - 9 December 2022

David Ivor Young, Baron Young of Graffham was a British politician. Young was the right-hand man to Thatcher during the controversial state privatisations of the 1980s, and attended the 1985 and 1986 Bilderberg meetings.

Family

David Young was born into an orthodox Jewish family in London. His younger brother, Stuart, was appointed chairman of the BBC in 1983, a post he held until his death at the age of 52, from cancer, in 1986.

Education

Young went to University College London, to take a law degree as an evening student during his time as an articled clerk to become a solicitor, being admitted to the roll of solicitors in 1955.

Early career

Having qualified as a solicitor, Young practised for only a year, after which he joined Great Universal Stores as an executive, working for part of that time as an assistant to the chairman, Sir Isaac Wolfson.

In 1961 he left GUS and set up his first business, Eldonwall Ltd. with funding from the Gestetner Family Settlements. During the sixties he built up a group of companies in industrial property, construction and plant hire, selling out in June 1970 to Town & City Properties PLC (T&CP), where he joined the board.

In the 1960s, David Young built up a group of companies in industrial property, construction and plant hire. He left the group in 1970 to form a property banking company with the American bank Manufacturers Hanover Trust.

Politics

He began to spend increasing amount of time advising Sir Keith Joseph and the reinvigorated Conservative Party under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher and became a director of the Centre of Policy Studies. After the 1979 election Young became Special Adviser to the Department of Industry. In 1982, he was made chairman of the Manpower Services Commission.

He never stood for election, but was appointed by the prime minister to the House of Lords in 1984 and was then whisked, within weeks, directly into the cabinet. Young never took a salary for his cabinet roles, which he didn't need as he went straight to a big bank afterwards.

He became a life peer in 1984 and joined the Cabinet a year later as Minister without Portfolio.

When Thatcher gave him a central role planning the 1987 election campaign, effectively keeping an eye on the party chairman, Norman Tebbit, whose leadership ambitions she suspected, he began to nurse his own aspirations for further political advancement. In a tape-recorded diary Young kept of that election campaign, he wrote of his membership of Thatcher’s "charmed circle" and speculated about the possibilities of his future posts. These included party chairman, leader of the Lords, foreign secretary or even prime minister, and to this end asked the MP Alan Clark to sound out ministerial opinion on the subject.

Later career

Young then went back to business as a director of the US investment bank Salomon Brothers and executive chairman of Cable & Wireless, a controversial appointment, as the company had been privatised during the previous decade when Young was industry secretary. From 1993 he was president of the Institute of Directors, and from 1995 was chairman of Council of University College, London. He was the first president of Jewish Care (1990–1997).

Young retired from Cable & Wireless in 1995 and in 1996 set up his own company, Young Associates Ltd, with partners Simon Alberga and Yoav Kurtzbard, which actively invests in technology companies. Outside Young Associates he had a number of business interests.

Front man for fraudsters

In 1996, Young was involved in the privatisation of the Rostock Port, in Germany. Following several years of decline in port traffic, the Rostock city council agreed to sell the port to Kent Investments Ltd., a company controlled by Young, in partnership with two Israeli businessmen, Menachem Atzmon and Ezra Harel. It was later discovered that Young was only a frontman for the Israeli investors. The two were later under investigation by Israel Securities Authority, suspected of fraud and breach of trust. They acquired the port by obtaining a loan from Rogosin Industries, a public company they controlled, which raised the money by issuing bonds. Rogosin Industries then received an option to buy 25 percent of the port in exchange for forgiving the loan. Rogosin Industries eventually exercised this option, which left Harel and Atzmon owning 75 percent of Rostock Port using Rogosin's funds. The case was investigated after Rogosin Industries defaulted on its bonds, as it run out of cash to pay its bondholders. The company later went into liquidation.

David Cameron

He would later become an enterprise adviser to David Cameron to advise on health and safety laws when he was prime minister. In November 2010, Young was widely criticised for suggesting most Britons had "never had it so good" during the "so-called recession".

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Bilderberg/1985	10 May 1985	12 May 1985	New York US Arrowwood of Westchester Rye Brook	The 33rd Bilderberg, held in Canada
Bilderberg/1986	25 April 1986	27 April 1986	Scotland Gleneagles Hotel	The 34th Bilderberg, 109 participants

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