Clive Cowdery is arguably the most influential non-politician in UK politics today. His proteges at the Resolution Foundation, a think tank he founded 20 years ago, now staff the halls of Westminster and its ideas occupy the minds of Labour\u2019s government ministers.<\/p>\n
While Resolution is largely seen as leaning to the left, Cowdery \u2014 an insurance entrepreneur whose \u00a3200 million ($267 million) fortune belies his impoverished upbringing \u2014 remains a champion of markets.<\/p>\n
\u201cCapitalism is the only model we have found for generating the kinds of returns which, provided it\u2019s linked to a proper redistributive system, can help lift people out of poverty,\u201d he says, sitting down for an exclusive interview with Bloomberg.<\/p>\n
Resolution\u2019s mission is to raise living standards for the people \u201cwe used to call the working poor,\u201d he adds \u2014 those who have jobs but still struggle to make ends meet. It\u2019s a demographic that has attracted increasing attention from political parties in recent years, one marker of Resolution\u2019s success.<\/p>\n
Another is the journey several of its top experts have made into the heart of British political decision-making. No fewer than seven Resolution associates have found themselves in senior government positions, five appointed since Labour\u2019s election victory in 2024. They include former chief executive Torsten Bell who oversaw last month\u2019s budget and has become a powerful cross-departmental pensions minister.<\/p>\n
The road from Resolution to Whitehall continues to be walked, with Emily Fry, an economist at the group, appointed as adviser to Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves in October, during the frenetic, late stages of the budget\u2019s construction.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.moneyweb.co.za\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/445812153-555x458.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The biggest furore around the budget stemmed from Resolution\u2019s office. When Reeves gave an unusual television address to the nation in early November, she seemed to be laying the ground for a manifesto-breaking rise in income tax, with reports that National Insurance \u2014 a payroll tax \u2014 would be cut to make up for it. The so-called \u201ctwo up, two down\u201d plan was ultimately dropped over the potential cost of breaking an election promise.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t break my heart,\u201d Cowdery says, when the subject comes up. \u201cHow progressive would that have been compared to what was announced, hey?\u201d<\/p>\n
He is clearly disappointed the budget, which Bell had such a hand in shaping, was not more ambitious, but refuses to be critical of the government.<\/p>\n
ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Persuasion<\/span><\/h3>\nDespite the personnel moves, Cowdery doesn\u2019t accept that Resolution is more influential than other research groups like the older, respected Institute for Fiscal Studies. It just takes a different approach, he says, as a \u201cthink-and-do tank.\u201d<\/p>\n
A decade ago, he moved Resolution\u2019s office to Queen Anne\u2019s Gate in the heart of Westminster, putting his organisation \u201cwithin sight of the target,\u201d as he puts it, gesturing at the UK Treasury building a stone\u2019s throw away on the corner of St James\u2019 Park.<\/p>\n
A pub called the Two Chairmen, a few paces from its front door, is the Treasury\u2019s local drinking hole, where Reeves celebrated on the evening of the budget. Resolution is literally on the doorstep of the power it hopes to shape. \u201cI\u2019m not interested in just putting ideas out,\u201d Cowdery says.<\/p>\n
Paul Johnson, who ran the rival IFS for 14 years, notes that Cowdery\u2019s team \u201cdid more advocacy, spent more time in Whitehall \u2014 they were more deliberate in their engagement with MPs, Labour MPs in particular.\u201d<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t hurt having a deep-pocketed benefactor, of course. Cowdery has put more than \u00a380 million into the Resolution Trust, which funds the foundation\u2019s work. Johnson can barely hide his envy. The IFS may have three times Resolution\u2019s \u00a33.7 million annual budget and more than twice its 30 staff, but it has to chase donor money and deliver client project work. Resolution\u2019s superpower is its singular focus.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is why we\u2019ve been successful,\u201d Cowdery says.<\/p>\n
While other wealthy Britons choose the direct route to political influence, like crypto investor Christopher Harborne\u2019s \u00a39 million donation to Nigel Farage\u2019s populist Reform party, Cowdery takes a subtler course.<\/p>\n
Generating ideas for debate via a think tank creates \u201cair cover\u201d for better government, he says. \u201cThe brave men and women in politics can only act within the headroom of what are publicly acceptable ideas. If they can\u2019t be envisaged, they can\u2019t be acted on. And no politician can act in advance of where the public has got to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Humble beginnings<\/span><\/h3>\nCowdery, 62, built his fortune with Resolution Life, which he set up in 2003 to buy closed life insurance funds, drive efficiencies and reward investors with steady returns. He turned the business into a \u00a35 billion FTSE 100 company, which he sold in 2008 before repeating the feat with Friends Life, which was acquired by Aviva for \u00a35.6 billion in 2015. In October he offloaded his final interests, all overseas, to Japan\u2019s largest insurer Nippon Life.<\/p>\n
\n\nADVERTISEMENT:<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
His financial success is a reminder that Cowdery is a champion of capitalism, for all his proto-socialist principles and lifetime interest in Soviet-era art.<\/p>\n
Where capitalism fails, he argues, is during periods of intense change. On a visit to the People\u2019s Museum in Manchester several years ago, he left in tears, he says, after following the story of industrial transformation from the spinning jenny to the modern day. \u201cYou watch industry by industry rise and affect vast swathes of people \u2013 and you don\u2019t want to stop that, but will we never learn how to transition people?\u201d What upset him was \u201cpolicy, failure to plan.\u201d<\/p>\n
To understand why he is so affected by such tales, it helps to know Cowdery\u2019s origins. Raised in Bristol, in England\u2019s west country, as one of five children by a Danish single mother with drug addiction, he and his siblings bounced through 19 different care homes, living in bedsits and on the streets, until Cowdery and his elder brother Steve were taken under the wing of a Christian family in North Somerset when he was nine.<\/p>\n
Cowdery\u2019s eyes fill as he recalls the 71-year-old \u201ctall, thin, silver-haired, courtly\u201d Doctor Spence in Bristol\u2019s affluent Clifton district who refused to give up on them, withholding the state-supplied two-week course of pills on which his mother overdosed numerous times \u2014 releasing them to her daily instead, until he found their new home.<\/p>\n
The family that took in him and Steve, which their mother would later join after an overdose that hospitalized her for 11 months, was deeply Christian and the church would shape his young life. He married, had children of his own and moved to a branch of the church in New York State in the US before returning to Cornwall.<\/p>\n
It was in Ronald Reagan\u2019s America and Margaret Thatcher\u2019s Britain that he saw it wasn\u2019t just penniless families on welfare like his that were struggling but working families who could barely survive on the income they brought home. That sense of injustice stayed with him, sowing the crusading seeds for Resolution, even after he lost his faith and left both the church and family in his late 20s to start again as a door-to-door insurance salesman, later remarrying and becoming a father once more.<\/p>\n
He won\u2019t discuss family, deflecting instead to his loss of faith. \u201cAll that happened is in my late 20s I grew up, and I began to separate the social desire to help from the religious desire to convert.\u201d Or perhaps his faith simply changed. In economics he has found a new liturgy, and in Resolution he has a pulpit.<\/p>\n
\u2018Propaganda by explanation\u2019<\/span><\/h3>\nDespite being a \u201cgrateful beneficiary\u201d of welfare, Cowdery is more concerned about working people. We need to \u201caddress the size of the state\u201d because it has become unaffordable \u2013 particularly the cost of working-age health benefits that the OBR estimates will increase by \u00a318 billion over the next five years to \u00a380.2 billion, he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe understand the role of disability support. It\u2019s just that we are hard-headedly aware that on this current trajectory, the country will not be able to afford future projected bills that come from that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cowdery\u2019s political interests stretch beyond Resolution. He owns Prospect magazine, with its long-form essays, and has a stake in The Observer newspaper. He compares their content to what The Observer\u2019s great editor David Astor called \u201cpropaganda by explanation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\nADVERTISEMENT:<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
If Cowdery has an equivalent in the UK\u2019s political-philanthropic firmament it is Paul Marshall, the founder of the $80 billion Marshall Wace hedge fund who owns The Spectator, a conservative magazine, and is a shareholder in right-wing TV channel GB News and the Unherd website. Politically, they appear opposites, particularly on Brexit, which Marshall backed, but Cowdery says the two \u201cfrenemies\u201d are closer than one might think.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve known Paul 20 years. We meet, we talk, we debate, we kiss, we leave. Paul and I would not be very far apart on our economic thoughts. We disagree about Brexit, but other than that, we\u2019re both broadly capitalists who believe in liberal democracy,\u201d he says. Marshall is devoutly Christian, whereas that is now in Cowdery\u2019s past.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.moneyweb.co.za\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/445881894-555x370.jpg\")
<\/p>\nPaul Marshall, founder of the $80 billion Marshall Wace hedge fund. Photographer: Lam Yik\/Bloomberg<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Marshall, once a supporter of the Liberal Democrats, has moved to the right since Brexit. Cowdery says Marshall is driven by the belief that \u201cculture creates the type of society we all enjoy, and that culture has become overly liberal.\u201d He is \u201ca sincere man, and sincerely wrong\u201d on that, he adds. A source familiar with Marshall\u2019s thinking responded that, while the two men are friends, nobody is perfect and it is a pity Cowdery has gone down a socialist-progressive route.<\/p>\n
Labour links<\/span><\/h3>\nCowdery styles himself centre-left but insists Resolution is apolitical, an argument that is not easy to sell. The think tank\u2019s first three chief executives, Sue Regan, Gavin Kelly and Bell, were special advisers to senior Labour Members of Parliament \u2013 Kelly and Bell to Labour leaders. Resolution\u2019s new chief executive Ruth Curtice, a former Treasury civil servant, is its first boss not to be overtly political.<\/p>\n
Cowdery points out that the think tank\u2019s president David Willetts is a former Tory minister and advisory council member Eleanor Shawcross was former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak\u2019s policy director. Less generous voices note that they represent a small minority at Queen Anne\u2019s Gate.<\/p>\n
It was a Tory, though, that gave Cowdery his crowning glory. In her first speech as Prime Minister after David Cameron resigned following the Brexit referendum in 2016, Theresa May chose to speak up for families who \u201cjust about manage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cowdery was astonished a Conservative would focus on \u201ca group of people that just 15 years earlier weren\u2019t on the political map,\u201d he says. \u201cOur single greatest accomplishment is that people across the political spectrum now routinely talk about the squeezed middle.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2025 Bloomberg<\/p>\n
Follow Moneyweb\u2019s in-depth finance and business news on WhatsApp here.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Cowdery, 62, built his fortune with Resolution Life, which he set up in 2003 to buy closed life insurance funds, drive efficiencies and reward investors with steady returns. He turned the business into a \u00a35 billion FTSE 100 company, which he sold in 2008 before repeating the feat with Friends Life, which was acquired by Aviva for \u00a35.6 billion in 2015. In October he offloaded his final interests, all overseas, to Japan\u2019s largest insurer Nippon Life.<\/p>\n
ADVERTISEMENT:<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
His financial success is a reminder that Cowdery is a champion of capitalism, for all his proto-socialist principles and lifetime interest in Soviet-era art.<\/p>\n
Where capitalism fails, he argues, is during periods of intense change. On a visit to the People\u2019s Museum in Manchester several years ago, he left in tears, he says, after following the story of industrial transformation from the spinning jenny to the modern day. \u201cYou watch industry by industry rise and affect vast swathes of people \u2013 and you don\u2019t want to stop that, but will we never learn how to transition people?\u201d What upset him was \u201cpolicy, failure to plan.\u201d<\/p>\n
To understand why he is so affected by such tales, it helps to know Cowdery\u2019s origins. Raised in Bristol, in England\u2019s west country, as one of five children by a Danish single mother with drug addiction, he and his siblings bounced through 19 different care homes, living in bedsits and on the streets, until Cowdery and his elder brother Steve were taken under the wing of a Christian family in North Somerset when he was nine.<\/p>\n
Cowdery\u2019s eyes fill as he recalls the 71-year-old \u201ctall, thin, silver-haired, courtly\u201d Doctor Spence in Bristol\u2019s affluent Clifton district who refused to give up on them, withholding the state-supplied two-week course of pills on which his mother overdosed numerous times \u2014 releasing them to her daily instead, until he found their new home.<\/p>\n
The family that took in him and Steve, which their mother would later join after an overdose that hospitalized her for 11 months, was deeply Christian and the church would shape his young life. He married, had children of his own and moved to a branch of the church in New York State in the US before returning to Cornwall.<\/p>\n
It was in Ronald Reagan\u2019s America and Margaret Thatcher\u2019s Britain that he saw it wasn\u2019t just penniless families on welfare like his that were struggling but working families who could barely survive on the income they brought home. That sense of injustice stayed with him, sowing the crusading seeds for Resolution, even after he lost his faith and left both the church and family in his late 20s to start again as a door-to-door insurance salesman, later remarrying and becoming a father once more.<\/p>\n
He won\u2019t discuss family, deflecting instead to his loss of faith. \u201cAll that happened is in my late 20s I grew up, and I began to separate the social desire to help from the religious desire to convert.\u201d Or perhaps his faith simply changed. In economics he has found a new liturgy, and in Resolution he has a pulpit.<\/p>\n
\u2018Propaganda by explanation\u2019<\/span><\/h3>\nDespite being a \u201cgrateful beneficiary\u201d of welfare, Cowdery is more concerned about working people. We need to \u201caddress the size of the state\u201d because it has become unaffordable \u2013 particularly the cost of working-age health benefits that the OBR estimates will increase by \u00a318 billion over the next five years to \u00a380.2 billion, he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe understand the role of disability support. It\u2019s just that we are hard-headedly aware that on this current trajectory, the country will not be able to afford future projected bills that come from that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cowdery\u2019s political interests stretch beyond Resolution. He owns Prospect magazine, with its long-form essays, and has a stake in The Observer newspaper. He compares their content to what The Observer\u2019s great editor David Astor called \u201cpropaganda by explanation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\nADVERTISEMENT:<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
If Cowdery has an equivalent in the UK\u2019s political-philanthropic firmament it is Paul Marshall, the founder of the $80 billion Marshall Wace hedge fund who owns The Spectator, a conservative magazine, and is a shareholder in right-wing TV channel GB News and the Unherd website. Politically, they appear opposites, particularly on Brexit, which Marshall backed, but Cowdery says the two \u201cfrenemies\u201d are closer than one might think.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve known Paul 20 years. We meet, we talk, we debate, we kiss, we leave. Paul and I would not be very far apart on our economic thoughts. We disagree about Brexit, but other than that, we\u2019re both broadly capitalists who believe in liberal democracy,\u201d he says. Marshall is devoutly Christian, whereas that is now in Cowdery\u2019s past.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nPaul Marshall, founder of the $80 billion Marshall Wace hedge fund. Photographer: Lam Yik\/Bloomberg<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Marshall, once a supporter of the Liberal Democrats, has moved to the right since Brexit. Cowdery says Marshall is driven by the belief that \u201cculture creates the type of society we all enjoy, and that culture has become overly liberal.\u201d He is \u201ca sincere man, and sincerely wrong\u201d on that, he adds. A source familiar with Marshall\u2019s thinking responded that, while the two men are friends, nobody is perfect and it is a pity Cowdery has gone down a socialist-progressive route.<\/p>\n
Labour links<\/span><\/h3>\nCowdery styles himself centre-left but insists Resolution is apolitical, an argument that is not easy to sell. The think tank\u2019s first three chief executives, Sue Regan, Gavin Kelly and Bell, were special advisers to senior Labour Members of Parliament \u2013 Kelly and Bell to Labour leaders. Resolution\u2019s new chief executive Ruth Curtice, a former Treasury civil servant, is its first boss not to be overtly political.<\/p>\n
Cowdery points out that the think tank\u2019s president David Willetts is a former Tory minister and advisory council member Eleanor Shawcross was former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak\u2019s policy director. Less generous voices note that they represent a small minority at Queen Anne\u2019s Gate.<\/p>\n
It was a Tory, though, that gave Cowdery his crowning glory. In her first speech as Prime Minister after David Cameron resigned following the Brexit referendum in 2016, Theresa May chose to speak up for families who \u201cjust about manage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cowdery was astonished a Conservative would focus on \u201ca group of people that just 15 years earlier weren\u2019t on the political map,\u201d he says. \u201cOur single greatest accomplishment is that people across the political spectrum now routinely talk about the squeezed middle.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a9 2025 Bloomberg<\/p>\n
Follow Moneyweb\u2019s in-depth finance and business news on WhatsApp here.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
ADVERTISEMENT:<\/p>\n
CONTINUE READING BELOW<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
If Cowdery has an equivalent in the UK\u2019s political-philanthropic firmament it is Paul Marshall, the founder of the $80 billion Marshall Wace hedge fund who owns The Spectator, a conservative magazine, and is a shareholder in right-wing TV channel GB News and the Unherd website. Politically, they appear opposites, particularly on Brexit, which Marshall backed, but Cowdery says the two \u201cfrenemies\u201d are closer than one might think.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve known Paul 20 years. We meet, we talk, we debate, we kiss, we leave. Paul and I would not be very far apart on our economic thoughts. We disagree about Brexit, but other than that, we\u2019re both broadly capitalists who believe in liberal democracy,\u201d he says. Marshall is devoutly Christian, whereas that is now in Cowdery\u2019s past.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nPaul Marshall, founder of the $80 billion Marshall Wace hedge fund. Photographer: Lam Yik\/Bloomberg<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Marshall, once a supporter of the Liberal Democrats, has moved to the right since Brexit. Cowdery says Marshall is driven by the belief that \u201cculture creates the type of society we all enjoy, and that culture has become overly liberal.\u201d He is \u201ca sincere man, and sincerely wrong\u201d on that, he adds. A source familiar with Marshall\u2019s thinking responded that, while the two men are friends, nobody is perfect and it is a pity Cowdery has gone down a socialist-progressive route.<\/p>\n