I am at the flagship Daylesford Organic in the Cotswolds, holding up a strange receptacle that looks like something you’d leave outside your house with a ‘please take me’ sign taped to it. Instead, this functionless pile of twigs – a ‘coppice basket’ – bears the same price tag as an iPhone 13. I ask a shop assistant why it costs £595, and am met with a withering look. ‘It’s made by a local artisan, actually.’
Over 20 years, Daylesford has grown from a little farm shop selling organic produce to a retail park behemoth, complete with a gym, spa, garden centre, and ranges of clothing, beauty and homeware. At the helm is founder Carole Bamford (wife of billionaire JCB chairman, Lord Bamford) whose expanding fiefdom now includes four pubs and 32 holiday cottages in surrounding villages.
There is no shortage of breathless column inches dedicated to Lady Bamford – or Lady B, as she is known to staff – and her enterprises. Harper’s Bazaar describes her as a ‘renaissance woman’, a ‘self-starting champion of sustainability, entrepreneur and tastemaker extraordinaire’. A review of her pubs in the Times describes them as ‘ravishing’. But a chorus of neighbours, from the Chipping Norton weekenders to the born-and-bred locals, are fed up with the streams of Daylesford traffic – and the clientele they ferry.
The glitzification of the Cotswolds is well-documented: the Soho Farmhouse effect; Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Squatting; the billionaires pricing out millionaires. But it seems that Lady Bamford’s imperial ambitions for the green hills of Gloucestershire know no limits.
After standoffs with a fleet of Porsche Cayennes in the car park, I arrived to find the aisles of Daylesford lined with magnums and jeroboams of Château Léoube, the Bamfords’ signature rosé. The produce is expensive – ‘£50 for a jar of honey’ expensive – but undeniably enticing. Bamford was an early adopter of the organic food movement, and is passionate about provenance and animal welfare; it’s said that she banters with Charles and Camilla over who first popularised the trend in Britain.
There are hundreds of punters thronging through the various outbuildings, yet very few carry shopping bags. It’s almost like they’ve come here to perform the pseudo-rustic Daylesford lifestyle. This may explain why the company has never turned a profit: in the last ten years, it has lost over £20 million. But that’s of little concern when Lady Bamford’s efforts are backed by a £7.65 billion fortune. JCB is the biggest privately owned manufacturing company in Britain.
The Bamfords’ primary residence is Daylesford House, a Grade I-listed Georgian pile on an estate next to the farm shop. The grand entrance hall is always festooned with flowers and climbing plants, and there are liveried staff on hand to ensure that any falling petals are caught before they hit the ground. It’s here that Lord and Lady B throw their lavish parties and perform their generosity – interior designer turned arbiter of ‘common’, Nicky Haslam, has a free pied-à-terre maintained for him at the Daylesford estate. There are second, third and fourth homes too: another Grade I-listed house in Staffordshire where JCB is headquartered, the aforementioned Château Léoube vineyard on the French Riviera, and a neo-Palladian villa in Barbados, where everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Richard E. Grant – both Bamford intimates – have stayed.
Lord Bamford is one of the purported Tory ‘super-donors’. He has given tens of millions to the Conservative Party over the last decade and the couple have been particularly generous to their close friend Boris Johnson. During the pandemic, Johnson was furnished with daily deliveries of Daylesford Organic ready meals, heated up and served to the then-Prime Minister by a personal Daylesford chef. The Bamfords paid for and hosted Johnson’s wedding to Carrie Symonds on the Daylesford estate, then gave the newlyweds free access to both Lady B’s £20 million pad in Knightsbridge and another of the estate’s cottages. But the ‘pro quo’ to the ‘quid’ never quite materialised for Lady Bamford. The Observer reported that she was marked to receive a damehood on a draft of Johnson’s final honours list, but the outgoing PM was thwarted from ennobling his landlady.
