(Bloomberg) -- Stuart Wheeler, who made his fortune pioneering spread betting in the U.K. before turning to politics and helping spearhead Britain’s departure from the European Union, has died. He was 85.
Wheeler died on Thursday, according to the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer last year.
A one-time barrister and a banker, it was the end of the postwar Bretton Woods financial system that made him a multi-millionaire. An inveterate gambler, the Eton and Oxford University-educated Wheeler saw the termination of the gold peg as an opportunity to bet on the precious metal. So IG Index was born in the middle of the 1970s on the top floor of Wheeler’s home in London’s Chelsea district.
A lull in the gold market saw him expand the business to betting on moves in commodities, currencies, stock indexes and sports, in the process putting IG at the forefront of the creation of the modern spread-betting industry.
The group floated on the London stock market in 2000, crystallizing a multi-million pound windfall for Wheeler. Three years after its listing, he sold his shares reasoning that at the age of 67 it was “pretty mad to have almost all your assets in one company.” He had also bought a castle and needed money for renovations. IG Group Holdings Plc was d at around 2.7 billion pounds ($3.5 billion) on Thursday.
Political Donations
This period also marked a rise in Wheeler’s profile when he made the largest private political donation in British history at the time with a 5 million pound gift to the Conservative Party in 2001. The donation did little to improve the party’s political fortunes. It would be nearly a decade before they would return to power.
In the meantime, Wheeler found another outlet for his political views as he became an increasingly assertive campaigner against the European Union. That saw him bring a legal case to force the U.K. government to hold a national referendum on the signing of a new EU treaty. The action failed but he was an early backer of leave campaigns, switching allegiance to the U.K. Independence Party. He was appointed the party’s treasurer in 2011. The U.K. voted to leave the bloc in 2016. The Telegraph dubbed Wheeler the “Banker of Brexit” for the millions he spent supporting the cause.
Horse Races
A gambler, Wheeler bet on everything from horse races to the sex of his first child, according to his autobiography.
“If I am in a cafe, I will make a bet with myself about how long it will take the waitress to make my coffee,” he wrote in memoir ‘Winning Against the Odds.’ “I gamble because I am fairly good at it. I gamble because I have a very strong desire to succeed. Most of all, I gamble because I am fascinated by probability and odds.”
Born in 1935, he was adopted by Alec Wheeler and Betty Gibbons. After studying law at Oxford, he trained as a barrister before taking a job at a bank in the City of London.
Who’s Who
He mixed with a Who’s Who of British high society. He played bridge with James Bond creator Ian Fleming and actor Omar Sharif and Wheeler was playing backgammon in the same room as Lord Lucan just days before the British aristocrat disappeared the night his family nanny was murdered. He was “doing a very good impression of a man with a completely untroubled mind,” Wheeler recalled.
He was married for 37 years to Tessa Codrington, who died in 2016 after her own battle with cancer. The couple had three daughters.
“If I had to put a bet on it either way, I would probably wager that extinction is our likely fate,” he wrote at the end of his autobiography while contemplating his agnosticism. “But I do not feel sure about this. This is a source of hope.”
(Wheeler was the uncle of Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, who wasn’t involved in the editing of this story.)
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