Comment: Who is Square Mile’s best investor?

Is it the hedge fund managers at Tosca, Odey or Lansdowne?

No. Perhaps someone who is triple A rated by Citywire (the service that ranks fund managers) such as: Nigel Thomas, Margaret Lawson or Patrick Barton?

All fine investors, but no. A simple farm girl from Suffolk, has a longer and better track record than all of them.

For a while, she used to work at Shell pensions, no journalist asks her opinion on the eurozone break up or the Government deficit.

She has never been on Bloomberg TV and no fund of funds know her name. She doesn’t spend her time worrying about beta, or portable alpha, she has an A level in economics, but the only book she has read on investing is John Kay’s Obliquity – “a wonderful little book” she says.

But I get ahead of myself. My investment story starts in the late 1960s, the pound had been devalued and her father, the farmer, saw that power was shifting from the landowners, himself included, to the corporations.

Unilever was sourcing peas from the farmers, for their Birds Eye frozen peas brand. They were tough but fair, farmers had to get their peas to the factory within two hours of harvesting or they wouldn’t get paid, she says.

The landowners formed a co-operative, to negotiate better with the corporation, but still the farmer could see the way things were going.

Rather than protest, the canny Scot bought shares in Unilever for all his children, £5,000 each (back then more than the average salary).

Unadjusted for inflation, one pound invested in Unilever is now worth £100. The average salary has increased tenfold and the average house price has increased only 32 times, so the investment has still done an order of magnitude better than inflation.

The brokers and advisers continued to tell her to sell. She occasionally did, but nothing ever did as well as Uni-lever. Eventually, she diversified into Shell. “They are Dutch, like Unilever. You can trust the Dutch, they are a sea faring nation, traders not pirates.”

A prejudiced view, but a very valuable prejudice. Other shares included M&S (the chairman was Dutch) and Lloyds Bank, which did not do so well. “Banks used to be good investments, then they changed. I’m not sure why they changed,” she said.