Hello Rainmakers,
As Westminster’s musical chairs continue, UK Private Capital boss and former Lib Dem minister Michael Moore is quietly working the airless meeting rooms at party conferences and in the City to make sure private equity is seen not as an extractive bogeyman, but as a critical engine of regional growth.
At his organisation’s London summit, he set out how he’s trying to shift perceptions in Whitehall, the Bank of England and the universities that can prosper as a recipient of his members’ money.
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Spare a thought for the chief executive of UK Private Capital, Michael Moore, who has been spending the month of September and then the early part of October, attending political party conferences, lobbying on behalf of the private equity and investment sector.
The former LibDem Treasury minister from the Coalition government of 2010 to 2015 may have been back with his tribe in Brighton for their conference this week, but he’s also had to keep up relations with Nigel Farage’s right wing organisation Reform UK Ltd, his old coalition muckers The Tories, then indisputably the most important gig of all, Andy Burnham’s new model Labour Party conference in Liverpool, with a completely new team to build relations with. Notably he’s been working hard on wooing the ministerial team of John Healey, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Rainmakers caught up with him at UK Private Capital’s summit in the City of London, where he was in bullish mood after leading City minister Lucy Rigby to the stage and hearing some encouraging words.
Moore says the sweetest words he’s heard are ‘We want to be partners with you’. He’s spent the last couple of years trying to get policymakers to understand what private capital is actually doing in the real economy – particularly outside the M25.
“We have spent a lot of time making sure that what we do around the country is better understood by our stakeholders, and the key thing, as I was talking about on stage earlier, is that the investment that we drive across the UK is leading to lots of jobs and lots of economic growth. To have the City minister play back to us that she wants to be partners with you is very very positive.”
That phrase – “we want to be partners with you” – clearly landed. It’s validation, he suggests, that the story the private capital in all its forms is being heard in Whitehall.
A big part of that story is about shifting economic power and perspective away from SW1.
“I was chatting to her about Number 10 North and how important that is, and just reinforcing the point that I think I see that as being another hub of economic decision making. But it’s like the BBC being in Salford. It’s about getting a different perspective on policy making for the economy and growth that happens to be based in Manchester, but will take a rest of the UK perspective.”
As a Scot who lives south of Edinburgh and commutes to London, he says he “embraces that wholeheartedly”.
He invested time in getting to know Andy Burnham back when he was an MP, but also when the PM was Mayor of Greater Manchester. It helps too that his director of public affairs, Karim Palant is also a supporter of Everton FC, indeed, when the two met at our Rainmakers Summit in Manchester in 2025 as much of the talk was about David Moyes as it was about the Mansion House Compact.
He’s grateful for the efforts Rainmakers has made to get indigenous regional private capital investment partnerships - GPs in industry parlance - like Palatine, NorthEdge and Endless to share a stage with our Mayors, and they have built on those opportunities.
“We had two roundtables with the then mayor there in Manchester, one in his office in Manchester, and one down here. I was really pleased about that because that gives the chance to showcase those around that table. Because again, sometimes what people don’t realise is that there’s infrastructure and real estate, private investment backing businesses coming out of Manchester Met or University of Manchester directly, all these things, they need the right kind of capital to grow, and I think there’s more to do. There’s a great story to tell about what’s going on in Greater Manchester, and on the other side of the Pennines in Leeds. Dare I say those bits do better than, say, Scotland, which I find as a Scot, I find competitively unfortunate. But you know, that’s a good challenge.”
