Working Class Zeroes 20 - Dale Vince

What makes a person immediately and irrevocably take against another person? Our Neolithic-brain animal instincts obviously play a large role in such decisions. In fact, the sensation is often so rapid that it feels much less like an actual decision, much more of a decree issued by one’s mysterious interior regions. It is all gut.

Obviously the process, whatever it actually is, varies between individuals. Everybody is liked by somebody, after all. There are - there must be - people out there who are glad when George Osborne, say, walks into the room. Or whose internal voice enthuses ‘ooh good, here comes Nadia Sawalha’.

For me, all of the specific triggers that activate the signal ‘I am not going to like this person’ are sparked by the mere sight of eco-millionaire Dale Vince. The alarm goes off, in fact, with disquieting force. Unlike the internal groan arising on exposure to, for example, Stella Creasy - where there is, as we have seen this week, a high probability of a big laugh in the offing - Vince is one of the thankfully very few figures in public life who evince in me what is currently known as ‘the ick’. It isn’t the full blown body horror I get from Alastair Campbell, the overpowering flinch that screams ‘this creature was not meant to be’, like something glimpsed oozing through a crack on the penultimate page of an M.R. James story. When I see Dale Vince, and he is hard to avoid, I don’t run for sanctuary to a holy place. But there is something about him that kicks against my soul.

I’ve forced myself to examine my reaction. Repeated exposure by choice to Dale Vince might, I hoped, weaken my discomfort. In the same way that therapists very gradually bring a spider closer to an arachnophobe.

By trying to slow the process down, I think I’ve hit on the source of my disquiet. Vince is a distillation, a cocktail of all the very worst qualities of the progressive extremist of our times. He has the truculence of the eternal teenager, the rigid moral certainty and moral superiority, the decided views about absolutely everything. There is also the pathetic and embarrassing display of ‘counter-cultural’ totems and emblems, in this case a tea towel and a wacky haircut. There is also a terrible lack of humour and proportion. Vince, I’m afraid, is not funny, either intentionally or unintentionally. And all these things are appreciable in less than a second of a first Vince encounter.

There is none of the human leaven that makes many other Holes and Zeroes almost loveable, despite their awfulness. Many of my subjects are merely twits. Vince is intelligent - horribly intelligent.

The admin now. Vince was born in 1961 in Great Yarmouth, where his dad ran a small haulage business. This gave me slight pause about his categorisation, but it seems to have been a self-employed nuts-and-bolts small business. Young Dale was state educated but dropped out of school aged 15 in 1977. I can’t be sure but the date, and the perpetual homage to its fashion, suggest to me the influence of punk. But sadly the angry side, not the funny, playful element.

We are told that Vince passed the next twenty years as a ‘New Age traveller’. This is a very 90s term, however, and most of this period was before the age of crusties, ‘Swampy’, etc. At the time we used to refer to such people mostly as ‘pains in the arse’.

In 1980, 19 year old Dale was present and participated lustily in the ‘occupation’ of RAF Molesworth, which had been chosen to house American cruise missiles. By 1985 he was at Stonehenge, and part of the ‘Battle Of The Beanfield’, in which the Wiltshire constabulary prevented 600 or so smelly middle class losers from enjoying their solstice ‘festival’ at the site.

How did Dale go from this rung, the low-level irritant, to becoming a hugely successful businessman?