Until the Financial Times’s revelations the Presidents Club co-chair David Meller was moving along a familiar path. A generous Conservative party donor and wealthy businessman who helps run his family’s company, Meller moved into education by sponsoring state schools in England after forming his own charity, the Meller Educational Trust.

Meller’s interest in academies was quickly rewarded by the Department for Education. In June 2013 he was appointed as a non-executive director on the DfE’s board, and less than a year later he was named chair of the government’s apprenticeship ambassador network.

By January 2016 Meller had also been named as a co-chair of government’s apprenticeship delivery board, which was tasked with helping the government hit its target of 3m apprenticeships by 2020. Meller shared the board’s chairmanship with Nadhim Zahawi, the Conservative who also attended the Presidents Club event exposed by the FT.

The honours continued, with Meller named to the board of the Mayor’s Fund for London, a social mobility charity. Meller was also on the charitable foundation behind TBAP, a trust that provides alternative education for excluded pupils.

By the time of the announcement of the latest new year’s honours list, it was no surprise to see Meller receiving an CBE “for services to education”.

It may have helped that Meller has been a trustee of the Conservative-leaning thinktank Policy Exchange, founded by Michael Gove. There he has rubbed shoulders with the likes of Theodore Agnew, a wealthy businessman and academy sponsor before being elevated to the House of Lords as an education minister.

Meller even agreed to serve as the finance chair of Gove’s ill-fated Conservative leadership campaign – although the campaign only lasted about 24 hours.



Now 58, Meller says he attended a comprehensive and obtained four O-levels but struggled with dyslexia during his time at school – an experience that first drove his interest in education.

Meller’s CV was further burnished by his place on the boards of several other worthy causes. But it is his co-chairmanship of the Presidents Club – which claims to have raised £20m for children’s charities in the UK – that has turned from a plus to a minus.

“It’s quite sad, really. He was so bloody desperate to be part of the establishment. Did all the stuff you’re meant to, threw money at the Tories, ended up with just an MBE rather than the peerage he desperately wanted,” said a former colleague.



“And now he’ll never get his ultimate prize. All because he couldn’t have enough nous to not go to an event where women were only there to be groped.”

Meller’s interest in supporting education policy saw him transform his charity into an academy trust in 2011, having sponsored a school, Bushey Academy, in 2009 after being approached under the last Labour government.

But although it has since become a multi-academy trust, last year it directly governed just two secondary schools – one in Bushey and another near Watford. Its relationship with the remaining schools it lists is as “an umbrella trust under service level agreements”, according to the trust’s 2017 annual statement.

But those services include Meller’s ability to call in favours for the benefit of a school: one of them, Hertswood academy, received a visit from the US ambassador in May 2016.

A photo on the school’s website shows the ambassador, Matthew Barzun, with Meller. “There’s no doubt that our strong business and political connections through the Meller Educational Trust continue to raise the aspirations of our community and provide access to unique opportunities at the highest level,” the school’s report said.