Businessman and politician, brought up in a Bath orphanage until the age of two and then adopted by a Cornish couple, his adopted father being a butcher and fisherman, his mother a hairdresser. With a Methodist background he won a scholarship to Truro School. At fifteen his adopted father wanted him to take an apprenticeship in the Falmouth Dockyards but instead he trained as a teacher at Southlands College from 1966 to 1969. He returned for an additional year in 1970, achieving a rare first-class honours degree in the London University B.Ed. For a short time, he worked as a secondary teacher for the Inner London Education Authority at a Wandsworth girls’ school. Deciding that teaching was not for him, he turned to finance, working at the Daily Telegraph as a financial journalist and then going to Rothschilds in 1974. In 1985 he became a pension fund manager for the Gartmore Group and was chairman from 1987 to 2001. From 2001 he held a series of high-profile appointments, including chairing the Guardian Media Group, Marks & Spencer, and the board of the Tate Gallery, and serving as Chancellor of the University of Exeter. Known as a liberal outsider in the City, Myners chaired the Low Pay Commission from 2006 until 2008 and was president of the Howard League for Penal Reform from 2012. Although never a Labour Party member, in the context of the financial crisis in 2008 he was appointed Financial Services Secretary to the Treasury and given a life peerage, helping with the £400bn bank rescue. He resigned the Labour whip in 2014 on joining the board of the Cooperative Group. He died on 16 January 2022 in London.

Entry written by: DCD
Category: Person
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