Meet Sir Rocco Forte: The Brexiteer hotels boss plotting expansion
The top hat-sporting, eastern European doorman at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair politely asks if I need directions (my attempt to blend in with the £600-plus-per-night guests obviously isn’t going well). In the lobby, Spanish waiters serve the hotel’s restaurant, Beck; an Italian concierge scrawls on a map and a Polish spa manager books someone for a £125 massage.
It’s the standard international staffing of a British hotel — in London, 40% of hospitality staff are from the EU. At Brown’s, though, the European accents are a cacophonous contrast to the plummy voice of Sir Rocco Forte, owner of this hotel and 12 others, and one of very few Brexiteers in Britain’s £130 billion hospitality industry.
Sir Rocco’s waiting in the Kipling Suite, just upstairs from the soirée where he hosted Boris Johnson’s prime ministerial victory party. The tycoon goes gooey over our new prime minister (“I’ve supported Boris for years — he’s the one who’ll unite the country! I hate these ghastly personal attacks on him! It’s because journalists are jealous of him for being successful, and men envy his success with women”).
Our PM sent a leaked text to David Cameron ahead of his first Leave speech, when Johnson claimed “Brexit will be crushed like the toad beneath the harrow”, from Rudyard Kipling’s poem Pagett, MP.
Sir Rocco’s not so fickle — he’s wanted to crush the UK’s EU membership for decades — and rants: “Disastrous negotiations... Three years of gloom and doom with the terrible Mrs May and her Eeyore Chancellor… Europe’s run by incompetent bureaucrats...”
Yet he doesn’t seem to have done much preparation for what happens next, despite the implications for his £34 million luxury hotels group Rocco Forte Hotels, which he wants to double in size in five years.
What are your post-Brexit staffing plans? “None, they’ll all stay here.” Assuming they do, when EU workers are quitting the UK at the fastest rate in more than two decades, the paperwork will be onerous: RFH employs 2245 staff.
Almost a quarter are based in the UK; 65% of those are EU migrants. CBI research predicts 96% of EU workers in hospitality would not gain entry into the UK under stringent Tier 2 visa rules set to be imposed under a no-deal Brexit. So how is Sir Rocco preparing? “We can still import people from the rest of the world.”
What about the extra costs of EU visas? “I haven’t budgeted anything.”
Sir Rocco is either a lone voice of sense in Britain’s vast hospitality industry, or he’ll face serious problems. There’s a get-out clause, though. Like fellow knighted Brexiteers Sir James Dyson, whose new factory is in Singapore, and Ineos tycoon Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who’s moved to Monaco, his upcoming investment is overseas. He’s hotel-hunting around Milan, Venice and Verona. Why not in the UK he expects to boom when freed from the EU? “Because Italy is the biggest tourist destination in the world. Cultural artefacts. Wonderful food, weather, scenery, and very high room rates.”
But, I posit, bar the weather, couldn’t you apply those points to the UK? Sir Rocco claims “outside of London there’s no UK city where you can get the rates to justify a big, five-star hotel”. He does, though, own The Balmoral in Edinburgh. He also co-owns newspaper The Catholic Herald.
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RFH is still a far cry from the FTSE 100 leisure empire, Trusthouse Forte, that Sir Rocco took over from his father, Lord Charles Forte, for just two years before it was gobbled up in Granada’s £3.8 billion hostile takeover in 1995.
“Granada broke up the business and sold off the bits for less than they paid,” Sir Rocco says, still angry. “A complete waste of time.”
Now 74, Sir Rocco claims Trusthouse Forte’s fall was partly “because my father stayed on quite a long time [until aged 85]” and “whilst he was there it was difficult to change things”. Could history repeat itself?
Sir Rocco launched his group with his sister, interior designer Olga Polizzi, in 1996. His three children, Lydia, Irene and Charles, work for him but aren’t on RFH’s board. Questions about succession are batted away. “It’s a bit early. I have to keep going for a while.”
Half of each year is spent travelling: “I love to meet guests.” Not all feel the same, though. “One wrote saying that as I was appearing on a platform with Nigel Farage, she’d no longer support my company, despite spending £20,000 on stays in the last few years. I wrote back with the well-argued speech that I read at a Leave rally, but didn’t hear back.”
Not that he’s losing sleep over this, or indeed any other Brexit planning engulfing his industry. “It’s her loss,” Sir Rocco retorts. “She can’t use my hotels.”
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