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Jon Moynihan, Baron Moynihan of Chelsea

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The Right Honourable
The Lord Moynihan of Chelsea
OBE
Official portrait, 2024
Member of the House of Lords
Lord Temporal
Incumbent
Assumed office
6 February 2024
Life peerage
Personal details
Born
Jonathan Patrick Moynihan

(1948-06-21) 21 June 1948 (age 76)
Cambridge, England
Political partyConservative
SpousePatricia Underwood
Alma mater
OccupationBusinessman and venture capitalist

Jonathan Patrick Moynihan, Baron Moynihan of Chelsea, OBE (born 21 June 1948) is a British businessman, venture capitalist and life peer. He served as the CEO and executive chairman of PA Consulting Group from 1992 to 2013.

Early life

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Moynihan was born on 21 June 1948 in Cambridge to Sir Noël Henry Moynihan and Margaret Mary Moynihan (née Lovelace).[1] His father was a general practitioner and a former president of the charity Save the Children.[2] Moynihan was privately educated at Ratcliffe College in Leicester,[3] and then studied at Balliol College, Oxford, matriculating in 1967.[4] He is a foundation fellow of Balliol.[5] He worked for Track Records and then the charities War on Want and Save the Children in India and Bangladesh. Between 1972 and 1976, Moynihan worked at the healthcare company Roche Products. He has additional master's degrees from the Polytechnic of North London and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[3][6]

Career

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His first consulting job was at McKinsey & Company in 1977 in Amsterdam.[3][6] He left the company to join Strategic Planning Associates in Washington in 1979. Moynihan then founded his own company, Moynihan Strategy Consultants,[1] later merging it with First Manhattan Consulting Group. In 1992, he was appointed as CEO of the consultancy PA Consulting Group, and later chairman.[6] At the time of his appointment, PA was "effectively bankrupt".[7]

At the company, he transitioned the ownership of the firm from a trust to an employee-owned model. Moynihan wrote a charter of ethics that was mandatory for employees to sign up to. He was credited for turning around the company in the 1990s.[8] Moynihan retired at the end of 2013 as chairman, having run PA for some 22 years, but remained as chairman and a principal of its venture capital arm, Ipex Capital.[6] In 2015, American private equity firm The Carlyle Group obtained a 51% share in the company,[9] valuing PA at $1 Billion.[7] In 2020, PA was re-sold to Jacob's Engineering at a value of $2.5 billion.[10]

From 1995 on, he founded, chaired and brought to success numerous startup companies.[1] As a journalist/author, Moynihan has been published extensively on topics such as trade, economics, health and football.[11]

Political activities

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Euroscepticism and Brexit

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Moynihan supports Brexit.[12] Prior to the 2016 referendum, he was a member of the eurosceptic campaign group Business for Britain and sat on its board.[13][14][15] While at Business for Britain, he was chairman of the editorial board, and came up with the name for Business for Britain's 1,000+ page argument for Brexit, "Change, or Go".[7] He was the chairman first, of the campaign committee; then of the finance committee, and a member of the board of the official pro-Brexit campaign organisation, Vote Leave[16][14][15] and was their final Chairman. Moynihan is the chairman of the pro-Brexit right-wing think tank Initiative for Free Trade.[17]

Support for Liz Truss

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Moynihan was the main fundraiser of Liz Truss's leadership campaign in the July–September 2022 Conservative Party leadership election, which led to Truss becoming prime minister in September 2022.[18]

Moynihan was against the view that a budget could not be produced without an accompanying Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast. He said: "This whole idea that you have to get the tick of approval from the OBR, which has been consistently wrong in its financial forecasts is, in my view, anti-democratic."[18] The bypassing of the OBR was said to be one of the causes of the failure of Truss's and Kwarteng's September 2022 mini-budget, which attempted to rip up decades of "Treasury orthodoxy".[18] In a commentary Moynihan asserted that the prime cause of market disruption at the time was the Bank of England's bungling.[19]

House of Lords

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Moynihan was nominated by Truss for a life peerage in her list of resignation honours.[20] He was created Baron Moynihan of Chelsea, of Chelsea in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, on 6 February 2024.[21]

Other

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In June 2019, he donated £100,000 to Boris Johnson during the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election.[12]

He is chairman of the education reform campaign organisation, Parents and Teachers for Excellence.[22][23]

He has campaigned for the Electoral Commission to be abolished.[24][25][15]

Voluntary activities, and honours

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He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1995 Birthday Honours for services to business.[26] Moynihan is a foundation fellow of, and was, from 1995 to 2007, chairman of the Campaign Board at, Balliol College, which helped raise during his chairmanship £35 million for the college and the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2010, he received a Distinguished Friends of Oxford award.[27] Moynihan is a fellow of Gray's Inn.[28] He served as the president of the Royal Albert Hall from 2015 to 2019.[29] He co-founded, with Helen Bamber OBE, and was the founding chairman, of the Helen Bamber Foundation.[30] He created a proposal for the Brompton and Marsden Hospitals to merge with other health organisations on the Chelsea Medical campus site.[31]

In 2021, Moynihan was named as one of UK's "Top 75 Catholic leaders".[32]

He is on the Advisory Council of the Free Speech Union.[33]

Personal life

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Moynihan is married to Patricia Underwood, a milliner who won a Coty Award in 1982.[34][6]

References

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  1. ^ a b c "Moynihan, Jonathan Patrick". Who's Who. A & C Black. 2023. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U251193. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ^ Marks, John (27 October 1994). "Obituary: Sir Noel Moynihan". The Independent. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
  3. ^ a b c Keenan, Brigid (1 April 2019). "Getting Dressed: Jon Moynihan". The Oldie.
  4. ^ "Distinguished Friends of Oxford". Floreat Domus. No. 20. Balliol College, Oxford. June 2014. p. 17.
  5. ^ "Foundation Fellows". Balliol College, Oxford. Retrieved 11 February 2020.
  6. ^ a b c d e Hill, Andrew (22 December 2013). "Jon Moynihan, the consummate consultant". Financial Times.(subscription required)
  7. ^ a b c "Graham Stewart profiles a political disruptor | The Critic". The Critic Magazine. 28 January 2020. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  8. ^ Murray, Shailagh (9 July 1997). "British Consultancy Found Needy Client In Its Own Office". The Wall Street Journal Europe. Retrieved 12 February 2020.
  9. ^ "PA targets ambitious growth with Carlyle investment". Consultancy. 30 September 2015. Retrieved 12 February 2020.
  10. ^ Directors, Clarion Energy Content (3 March 2021). "Jacobs acquiring 65% stake in PA Consulting for $1.8B". Power Engineering. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  11. ^ "Jon Moynihan | Freelance Journalist | Muck Rack". muckrack.com. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  12. ^ a b "Boris Johnson has received £500,000 in donations since May". The Guardian. 17 July 2019.
  13. ^ "Change, or Go" (PDF). Business for Britain. p. 1029. Retrieved 11 February 2020.
  14. ^ a b "About the Campaign". Vote Leave. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  15. ^ a b c "Institute of Economic Affairs appoints Jon Moynihan OBE to its Board of Trustees". Institute of Economic Affairs. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  16. ^ "Vote Leave" (PDF). Vote Leave. p. 3. Retrieved 11 February 2020.
  17. ^ "About". Initiative for Free Trade. Retrieved 11 February 2020.
  18. ^ a b c Robinson, Nick (4 December 2022). "Eleven gambles that went wrong for Liz Truss". BBC News. Retrieved 4 December 2022.
  19. ^ Moynihan, Jon (23 November 2022). "How the Bank broke the Government". The Critic. Retrieved 16 December 2022.
  20. ^ "Resignation Peerages December 2023" (PDF). GOV.UK. Retrieved 30 December 2023.
  21. ^ "No. 64313". The London Gazette. 12 February 2024. p. 2726.
  22. ^ Dickens, John (22 September 2016). "Vote Leave campaigner and Tory donor behind Parents and Teachers for Excellence campaign". Schools Week.
  23. ^ "Supporters". Parents and Teachers for Excellence. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  24. ^ ""An experiment that has failed". Jon Moynihan of Vote Leave's full submission about the Electoral Commission". Conservative Home. July 2020. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  25. ^ Hope, Christopher (27 June 2020). "Electoral Commission must be abolished and handed back to councils, says Vote Leave as director speaks out". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  26. ^ "Supplement to The London Gazette, 17th June 1995". The London Gazette. 16 June 1995. p. 13.
  27. ^ "2010 Distinguished Friends of Oxford". Archived from the original on 3 December 2010. Retrieved 28 March 2010.
  28. ^ "Fellows". Gray's Inn. Retrieved 11 February 2020.
  29. ^ Andy Ricketts. "Royal Albert Hall appoints new president". Third Sector. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
  30. ^ "Philanthropy | Helen Bamber". www.helenbamber.org. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  31. ^ "The Chelsea Society | The Royal Brompton Hospital". The Chelsea Society. 11 July 2016. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  32. ^ "Top 75 Catholic leaders in the UK today". Catholic Herald. 1 March 2021. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  33. ^ "Who We Are". The Free Speech Union. Archived from the original on 7 August 2020. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
  34. ^ "CFDA". cfda.com. Retrieved 18 August 2021.
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