Known to their loyal staff as DB and FB, the Barclay twins are self-made men whose father, a Scottish salesman, died when they were teenagers. They grew up in humble circumstances in London’s Shepherd’s Bush, and started their business careers in estate agency. They moved into property and hotels in the 1960s, weathering the property slump in the 1970s and disposing of several of their large London hotels towards the end of the decade.

In the 1980s, they added more hotels and acquired Ellerman Lines, a privately owned shipping and brewing group. They bought and sold a stream of assets including London’s Ritz hotel, becoming press barons with the acquisition of The European, a loss-making newspaper, and later Scotsman Publications. In 2002, they purchased Littlewoods, the retail chain, merging it with GUS’s home shopping division in 2004, when they bought the Telegraph group of newspapers from Lord Black.