Philip Hammond may have been branded the ‘ultimate boring accountant’ but school friends have revealed he was a boozing goth ‘with a twinkle in his eye’
Philip Hammond may have been branded the ‘ultimate boring accountant’ but school friends have revealed he was a boozing goth ‘with a twinkle in his eye’ who looked like a young Johnny Depp and ran glam rock discos.
Fellow Shenfield sixth-former Nina Stratford said the Chancellor would regularly go to the pub at lunchtime and they even shared a ‘cheeky snog’ after a night on the sherry in his bedroom.
Ahead of his first Autumn Statement today Nina Stratford told BBC Newsnight: ‘I remember going round to his house once. We got hold of half a bottle of sherry and proceeded to drink it, and very randomly we ended up having a bit of a cheeky snog’.
And she was impressed, adding: ‘Who’d have thought that Philip Hammond was such a good kisser?’
Miss Stratford, now an actress living in High Wycombe, said: ‘Phil was always going places – he was very bright and he really had something about him.’
Nina Stratford, now an actress living in High Wycombe, had a ‘cheeky snog’ with the Chancellor and enjoyed it
But as a teenager he was something of a wildchild, friends say, inviting them to his bedroom to secretly gulp down Bacardi and other booze hidden away from his parents.
Lifelong friend Graham Norton, said the Chancellor had said he would be a millionaire by 30 – and he was after graduating from Oxford and making a fortune in property.
The pair decided that their life as teenagers in suburban Essex was too dull and they set up discos in their school hall where Mr Norton would DJ for ’20 quid’ and Mr Hammond would ‘make a fortune’ from ticket sales.
He said: ‘Philip once said to me that he wanted to be a millionaire by the time he was 30 – and I think he did actually achieve that in the end’.
TV star Richard Madeley was also in their year at school, and says that he was the most popular boy in their year.
He said last year that Mr Hammond was popular, outgoing and as handsome as a movie star, describing him as a long-haired ‘goth’ who ‘looked like Johnny Depp back in his pomp’.
He added: ‘He had very long jet-black hair that fell down in to crows wings to his shoulders.
‘He invariably came to school in a long black leather trenchcoat. Phil was very friendly and popular. The guys liked him. We would seek him out for conversation because he was very bright and was very politically switched on.
‘He was very very bright. He put his big boots on the desk and start reading the Telegraph and swapping political dialogue with our history teacher who was a Guardian reader.
‘And usually towards the end of the class they would swap papers and then they would sort of score jolly points off each other making political points.
‘He barely needed to pay attention he sucked it up by osmosis. He think he got straight A’s’.
Mr Hammond was grilled about his schoolboy look when Theresa May made him Chancellor.
Piers Morgans asked him on Good Morning Britain last year: ‘Did you worship Marilyn Manson in your school days?’
Amused by the comments, Mr Hammond simply said ‘shocking, shocking’, before defending himself by claiming goths ‘hadn’t even been invented in those days’.
The Chancellor was born in Epping in Essex in December 1955. The son of a civil engineer, he went to Shenfield school in Brentwood before studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford.
He launched a business in 1978 reproducing church brass rubbings for tourists, but it failed to get off the ground.
Mr Hammond went on to be a manager in private industry and made millions from a range of property, construction and manufacturing businesses before becoming a Conservative MP in 1997, when he was 41. In 2009 his wealth was estimated at £9million.
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