Darius Guppy

Darius Guppy (born 1964) is a British–Iranian businessman, noted for his colourful ancestry, high-society contacts and unconventional opinions.

When his father was ruined in the 1990s crisis at Lloyd's of London, Guppy sought revenge by successfully claiming from Lloyd's after a faked jewel robbery. Betrayed by an accomplice, he was eventually jailed.

Guppy now lives with his family in South Africa and has expressed contempt for modern Britain and western governments in general^[2] as well as an intense dislike of the British media.^[3][4][5]

Early life

Eton College

Guppy's mother was the Iranian author and singer Shusha Guppy (1935–2008).^[6] His grandfather on his mother's side was the philosopher and theologian Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Mohammed Kazem Assar, who held the chair of philosophy at Tehran University; his maternal cousin, another Assar grandson, is Hooman Majd.

His father was Nicholas Guppy, the writer and explorer who died May 2012 in Bali.^[7] On his father's side he is a descendant of Lechmere Guppy, the naturalist who discovered the eponymous fish, as well as the inventor Sarah Guppy,^[8] Thomas Guppy, the engineer and business partner of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the explorer Amelia Guppy, Sir Francis Dashwood, Bt (founder of the Hellfire Club) and the medieval Plantagenet family.^[9]

Guppy was educated at the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle, Eton College, and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he got a first class degree in history and French. In his second year, he became a member of the Piers Gaveston Society, as well as the Bullingdon Club.^[10] He was the best man at Earl Spencer's wedding to model Victoria Lockwood, his first wife; Lord Spencer was his best man in return. He was a close friend and boxing nemesis of Boris Johnson, who later became the Mayor of London,^[11] as well as of Count Gottfried von Bismarck.

Although he comes from a mixed Christian and Islamic background, he has expressed opposition at Saudi inspired Wahabbism and Islamic fundamentalism in general, describing it as "heresy" and that he would wish for Europe to remain Christian.^[12][13][14]

He is married, has a daughter and two sons, and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.^[15]

In February 1993, Guppy was jailed for staging a faked jewel robbery and claiming £1.8 million from the insurers, part of London's Lloyd's insurance market. The trial which accompanied his conviction became something of a media sensation.^[16][17]

Guppy's fraud in New York was a fake jewel heist, intended as retribution against Lloyd's of London after his father lost his home and money in the Lloyd's of London financial crisis of the 1990s.^[15] Guppy and his business partner, Benedict Marsh, hired a man to fake a robbery, discharge a firearm and tie them up. The crime occurred without hitch and his company was paid out by Lloyd's for the supposed stolen jewels within a few weeks of the robbery occurring. The offence did not come to light until over a year later, after a police informer who had acted as an accomplice had been arrested attempting to imitate the pair.^[18][19] Guppy was sentenced to five years in jail. The presiding judge at his sentencing, which occurred three years later, stated: "…The offences were in my view extremely well planned and very carefully executed enterprises".^[20][21] At his trial in its opening speech the prosecution described the scheme as: "bold, well-researched and meticulously executed".^[21]

It is believed that Guppy transported the jewels from the fake robbery by private aircraft which he piloted from the UK to mainland Europe.^[22]

Personality

In 1990, he planned to assault News of the World journalist Stuart Collier, whom he believed had been attempting to smear members of his family.^[15][23][24] During a telephone call he asked Boris Johnson (then a journalist at the Telegraph) to provide the journalist's address. The address was not provided and the attack never took place, but a tape of the conversation was leaked to the press.^[25] Darius claimed the fake jewel robbery too was an act of vengeance as his father had lost the family fortune with Lloyd's of London.^[22] When a British journalist published an article in which a disparaging remark was made about his wife, Guppy found out the journalist's address, waited for him outside his house, "knocked him to the ground" and covered him in horse manure in front of his neighbours. He filmed the event but stated that he did not publish the film as he wished to avoid "additional hurt" to the journalist's family.^[4][26][4]

In 2009, breaking a thirteen-year silence, Guppy claimed 'Britain has become an "urban hell" and a dispenser of "moral poison" whose citizens are enslaved by a "culture of consumerism".'^{[27][28][29][30]}

In 2010, in an article published by the Sunday Telegraph, he compared the activities of the banking industry with those of counterfeiters.^[31][32]

Writing for the Independent on Sunday, Guppy argued that remedies proposed by western governments for the financial crisis were bound to fail because they were dependent on permanent and unsustainable economic growth.^[33][34]

In an essay published by the Asia Times, Guppy called for the creation of debtors' unions to bring about radical change to a financial system which he argued prejudices the majority, including the middle classes.^[35]

In an article for the New Statesman, Guppy argued that Britain's financial and political elite consists of "clowns" lacking vision or original ideas and that "Not a single prominent financier or politician either predicted the economic disaster or has put forward any measure that has the remotest prospect of resolving the crisis."^[2][36]

Writing for The Spectator magazine after The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, had received a mauling in a television interview at the hands of TV presenter Eddie Mair, Guppy argued that Eddie Mair and the press in general lacked the "moral authority" to lecture the Mayor of London whose misdemeanours he argued seemed trivial next to those of other politicians and media figures.^[37]

In an article for the New Statesman, Guppy wrote "a disturbing account of an angry incident in London, Boris Johnson's old friend fights back against his detractors in the press" and a polemic against a "decadent" British Media, describing how he had exacted revenge against a journalist who had made a disparaging remark against his wife. He argued that the Leveson Report into the activities of the British Press was inadequate, that the Press was not "free" but controlled by "a handful of rather unpleasant individuals" and that it tended not to report the truth in any case and therefore did not fulfil its role as a protector of a free society^[4]

In another essay for the New Statesman, Darius Guppy wrote in praise of Iran arguing that Iran had the right to pursue its quest for nuclear technology and that Western powers were hypocritical for supporting Saudi Arabia with its far more dangerous Wahhabi ideology."^[38]

Writing for The Traditional Britain Group, "Darius Guppy surveys the wasteland of France's banlieues and compares them to the ancien regime glory of St Denis Basilica and the France of forty kings", arguing that the Enlightenment has not turned out to be the success claimed but "the disaster we call the Enlightenment."^[39]

Writing for The Spectator (Coffee House) in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks, he argued that the global economic system poses a much bigger threat to the planet than Islamic radicalism and that increasing “Orwellian legislation” reveals the true function of the state which is no longer to protect the citizen but to protect the economic order. The existence of Islamic State and Al Quaeda in fact serves this agenda.^[40]

In The Spectator he argued that the Brexit Referendum had been as much a protest against neoliberal economics as the EU itself. Globalising institutions like the EU in fact do the bidding of international banks and the nation state represents the only effective counter against the resulting homogenisation.^[41]

Writings

Guppy has worked as a poet,^{[42][43][44][45]} having been praised by Christopher Logue, Elizabeth Jennings and Peter Levi, and wrote his autobiography, Roll the Dice in 1996. In this, he describes his illustrious ancestors and the family name of Gupa meaning "bright in battle". This background inspired him and he says that, "Boldness and cheek were essential ingredients for success." But the book was not well received by critic Roger Clarke who, writing for The Independent, summarised it as a "horrific hybrid. His faults are glaringly magnified by the dumb journalese, his more iconic and unusual qualities entirely dwarfed by the book's money-garnering glee."^[46]

Bibliography

• Guppy, Darius (1996). Roll the Dice. Blake Publishing. ISBN 1-85782-159-9. ^[47]

References