Meet Sir Rocco Forte: The Brexiteer hotels boss plotting expansion

Yet he doesn’t seem to have done much preparation for what happens next, despite the implications for his £34 million luxury hotels group Rocco Forte Hotels, which he wants to double in size in five years.

What are your post-Brexit staffing plans? “None, they’ll all stay here.” Assuming they do, when EU workers are quitting the UK at the fastest rate in more than two decades, the paperwork will be onerous: RFH employs 2245 staff.

Almost a quarter are based in the UK; 65% of those are EU migrants. CBI research predicts 96% of EU workers in hospitality would not gain entry into the UK under stringent Tier 2 visa rules set to be imposed under a no-deal Brexit. So how is Sir Rocco preparing? “We can still import people from the rest of the world.”

What about the extra costs of EU visas? “I haven’t budgeted anything.”

Sir Rocco is either a lone voice of sense in Britain’s vast hospitality industry, or he’ll face serious problems. There’s a get-out clause, though. Like fellow knighted Brexiteers Sir James Dyson, whose new factory is in Singapore, and Ineos tycoon Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who’s moved to Monaco, his upcoming investment is overseas. He’s hotel-hunting around Milan, Venice and Verona. Why not in the UK he expects to boom when freed from the EU? “Because Italy is the biggest tourist destination in the world. Cultural artefacts. Wonderful food, weather, scenery, and very high room rates.”

But, I posit, bar the weather, couldn’t you apply those points to the UK? Sir Rocco claims “outside of London there’s no UK city where you can get the rates to justify a big, five-star hotel”. He does, though, own The Balmoral in Edinburgh. He also co-owns newspaper The Catholic Herald.

RFH is still a far cry from the FTSE 100 leisure empire, Trusthouse Forte, that Sir Rocco took over from his father, Lord Charles Forte, for just two years before it was gobbled up in Granada’s £3.8 billion hostile takeover in 1995.

“Granada broke up the business and sold off the bits for less than they paid,” Sir Rocco says, still angry. “A complete waste of time.”

Now 74, Sir Rocco claims Trusthouse Forte’s fall was partly “because my father stayed on quite a long time [until aged 85]” and “whilst he was there it was difficult to change things”. Could history repeat itself?

Sir Rocco launched his group with his sister, interior designer Olga Polizzi, in 1996. His three children, Lydia, Irene and Charles, work for him but aren’t on RFH’s board. Questions about succession are batted away. “It’s a bit early. I have to keep going for a while.”

Half of each year is spent travelling: “I love to meet guests.” Not all feel the same, though. “One wrote saying that as I was appearing on a platform with Nigel Farage, she’d no longer support my company, despite spending £20,000 on stays in the last few years. I wrote back with the well-argued speech that I read at a Leave rally, but didn’t hear back.”

Not that he’s losing sleep over this, or indeed any other Brexit planning engulfing his industry. “It’s her loss,” Sir Rocco retorts. “She can’t use my hotels.”