What motivates the billionaires who back Brexit? Is it just the money or have they got some other weird political agenda they think would be easier to force through as Britain exited the EU?

In the case of Tory-supporting Brexiteer hedge fund billionaire Crispin Odey, it looks like a bit of both.

I’m conscious a lot of Morning Star people are for a “Lexit” — viewing the EU as a capitalist club that would restrict any attempt to shift money and power from the corporations to the people, they are solidly for Leave. I don’t think anyone sensible can look at what the EU did to Greece and believe that the EU is the “Good Place.” But I think there is more than one exit door. People like Odey want to leave one capitalist club and enter an even meaner millionaires’ playground.

Odey has given the Tories £330k since 2007, including a £50k donation in the run-up to the 2017 election. In 2016, Odey also put £539k into the Leave referendum campaign, funding two of the smaller Eurosceptic campaigns , the Democracy Movement and Global Britain. Odey also helped push Brexit by giving Ukip £32k between 2010 and 2015.

This October, Odey told the Mail he backed Boris, indicating he was ready to bankroll a leadership bid. The month before, Odey suggested he might even try to become a politician himself. The hedge fund boss told Financial News: “You suddenly realise you’ve got to become politically involved again,” adding “I’ve wasted my time making money for the last 30 years and watching the body politic getting worse and worse.”

Can Odey cure the body politic by injecting his money into Boris or inserting himself into the front line? What does he want from a Boris-y Brexit? Arguably, Odey actually enjoys economic disruption and political turmoil threatened by Brexit, Boris or both. They create more chances for his hedge fund, Odey Asset Management, to make money through speculation, like betting against the pound or gambling on company failures.

In November, Odey told the Times he was “making hay” when the threat of a no-deal Brexit made the pound crash because, economically, “bad days tend to be good days for us.” As the Guardian recently showed, Odey’s firm will also benefit if a number of retail firms crash and burn in some kind of consumer crisis. Odey Asset Management has “short positions” — effectively, bets that their share prices will fall — against retail firms including Debenhams and a major car dealer.

Odey’s political plans are sometimes more exotic and they don’t always work out. In 2009 Odey gave £25k to a “faith-based conservative party” with the full title “Christian Party: Proclaiming Christ’s Lordship.” They were led by Reverend George Hargreaves, a former songwriter turned Pentecostal minister. Ironically, given the Christian Party’s strong anti-gay stand, Hargreaves wrote “So Macho” and “Cruising,” two 1980s gay anthems performed by Sinitta.

The Christian Party said its primary purpose was to “proclaim the Lordship of Christ.” Their version of Christ obviously appealed to Odey’s Tory instincts. The party backed “small government, greater neighbourly responsibility and low taxes in an economy driven by thrift and enterprise” and wanted to “sell off state-owned hospitals and healthcare facilities to private sector healthcare providers.”

They linked anti-abortion and anti-immigration politics, arguing “states which kill their unborn are having to replace this missing workforce through liberalising the numbers of people they admit, with inevitable issues relating to integration.”

While they attracted Odey’s money, the party didn’t attract many votes. They stood 71 candidates in the 2010 election, who all lost their deposits with votes hovering around 1 per cent of the electorate. What Odey’s backing for the Christian Party showed, I think, is that Tory billionaires are unsurprisingly attracted to slash-and-burn economics but are happy to mix this up with some fairly freaky politico-religious ideas along the way.

Privatisation.

The Institute for Government issued a report this month on “Government Procurement” in which it revealed:

“Government spends £284bn on outsourcing — a third of public spending — and the biggest suppliers are winning more work than ever. But government doesn’t have the data to manage procurement well or to judge how it’s going”

The Institute for Government is a Lord Sainsbury-funded technocratic bunch. I wouldn’t often agree with their conclusions, but I am confident they do their sums right.

So how is this happening? How has the state become so hollowed out that it is handing over services formerly run by the state to companies like Serco and Interserve? We can see these firms squeeze out cash for ever poorer services. As the Institute says, the government simply can’t tell if they are “value for money.” There is little “free market” as the same big companies get all the contracts.

There are big reasons why this is happening, to do with decades of neoliberalism. But there is also a down-to-earth reason. These big corporations have enough money, squeezed out of the public sector, to hire political insiders who encourage further privatisation.

So a few days before the Institute for Government issued this report, right-wing think tank Reform held a conference on Reimagining Public Services for Citizens. Speakers included Norfolk Tory MP George Freeman. He is one of the party’s “intellectuals.”

Also speaking was Sir Bernard Jenkin MP, who chairs Parliament’s public administration committee. The whole event was paid for by Serco, one of the leading privatisation contractors. Serco had to be kicked off one of their biggest contracts for electronically tagging people on probation because they cheated on the deal. Serco chief executive Rupert Soames was on the platform. Soames was hired for his Tory contacts — he is a grandson of Churchill and brother of leading Tory MP Nicholas Soames.

This feature of privatisation firms hiring political insiders is very widespread. Giant contractor Interserve is close to calamity. The firm has taken out too much profit for poor work and is close to a Carillion-style collapse. Lord Norman Blackwell was Interserve’s chairman from 2006-16 and so responsible for the firm’s growth. Blackwell is a Tory lord and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher. So there are deep reasons why the state has been hollowed out for these privatisers. But I wouldn’t discount the shallow one either — that they hired the right people from the old boy’s club.