A group of protesters is gathered outside the Treasury building in Whitehall on a cool spring evening, demanding higher taxes for the wealthy while criticizing Labour’s proposed cuts to welfare spending.
The individuals advocating for a wealth tax range from a Green MP to a union leader, activists against the privatization of public services, and other demonstrators expressing familiar anti-government sentiments. The scene is unfolding as expected.
However, the atmosphere changes when Gary Stevenson, dressed in a tracksuit and anorak with a shaven head, approaches the microphone. His presence commands a quiet respect from the crowd, signaling that he is the focal point of the gathering.
He is also the new kid on the block. The paperback edition of his memoir of a career in international banking, The Trading Game, shot to the top of the bestseller lists when it was published in January and has remained there ever since.
The story of his rise from the rags of east London to the riches of banking’s aristocracy have also made him a poster boy of the Left.
The reason? His attacks on the wickedness of wealth and the evils of a tax system that cossets the affluent at the expense of the poor.
But it’s worth pointing out that Stevenson only became a champion of the dispossessed after he had made many millions on the trading floor at Citibank amid the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf.
His new role is proving lucrative, too. The former City boy’s YouTube channel, Gary’s Economics, with its relentless focus on inequality, has accrued more than a million subscribers in a year. And it’s growing fast, having attracted 300,000 in the last month alone, at a rate of 10,000 a day.
He’s also a big hit on Instagram, with 632,000 followers, 200,000 of them added in the last month. According to one of his more excitable YouTube fans, these numbers represent ‘a major vibe shift’.
They are also reminiscent of the early progress of another social media phenomenon (although one with a very different message), Andrew Tate, of which more later.
Stevenson, 38, adds a new video aimed at demystifying economics for the benefit of his devoted followers once a week.
Most are filmed, it is said, in the spacious kitchen of his flat in London’s fashionable Docklands district, a property purchased with one of his fat financial sector bonuses.
He has become so ubiquitous that he is very hard to avoid. Travellers on the London Underground are confronted with images of his face staring out of advertisements for his book and on Thursday he was one of the five guests on BBC1’s prestigious political panel show Question Time, this week broadcast from Dartford in Kent.
One of the topics discussed, whether Britain’s yawning deficit should be plugged by cutting welfare claimants’ benefits or targeting the fortunes of millionaires, could have come from one of his own YouTube videos.
But the show also offered a rare opportunity for some of his simplistic, agitprop-type solutions to be tested by rigorous questioning.
Admirers – and it must be said there are many – see Stevenson as a brilliant new analyst of all that is wrong with the nation’s economy.
They view his prodigious output as a comprehensive manifesto for our times, an agenda that lays bare the supposed depravity of the way the Western world manages and distributes its money.
The Guardian (naturally) treats Stevenson’s words with nothing short of reverence, swooning over what it calls his ‘incredible story’, while his cures for our ills are treated like biblical truths etched on tablets of stone.
And then there is his book, a work the Left regards as being unerringly in tune with the zeitgeist.
A quote from former Tory minister Rory Stewart – ‘An unforgettable story of greed, financial madness and moral decay’ – adorns the cover.
Inside, there’s this from the Jeremy Corbyn-backing Scottish author of Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh: ‘The Wolf Of Wall Street with a moral compass, it lays bare the spiritual vacuity of the systems and processes that both dominate and reduce our humanity.’
On the face of it, Stevenson is an unlikely subject of such lavish praise from the metropolitan elite given his previous career as a ruthless financial trader.
Stevenson claims that the fortune he accumulated was the result of betting against the market after coming to the conclusion that growing poverty in the 2010s would keep interest rates low when other traders believed they would rise.
The way he tells it, this lightbulb moment made him not just a good operator in the high-pressure world of foreign currency trading but ‘the best in the world’, a claim that is crucial to his current status.
He was so good, he says, that – when he cashed out – he had enough money to never have to work again. All this before his 30th birthday.
In person he is awkward, possibly shy, but on-screen it’s a very different story: He delivers his doom-laden predictions with an animated charisma. Economic inequality and the lack of affordable housing, he insists, mean the middle classes will collapse into poverty just as many working people already have.
Stevenson’s slick and punchy homilies, delivered in his estuary accent and liberally interspersed with four-letter words (except when he’s on the BBC, of course), are lapped up by his army of fans.
At Tuesday’s rally, timed to take place a day before Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement, his monologue was greeted with whoops and cheers by the crowd.
For many, his appeal lies not just in the somewhat questionable economic wisdom he dispenses but in his bona fide working-class roots.
What does not seem to have hurt him – so far, at least – are troubling questions about the credibility of some of the flamboyant claims this former London School of Economics student has made about his working history.
So, what is the truth about his aforementioned ‘incredible story’ and how has he managed to turn himself into such a social media phenomenon?
A postman’s son, he grew up in a single-income home in an Ilford cul-de-sac. One particularly vivid early childhood memory involved watching the distant construction of shiny towers on the site of the former docks at Canary Wharf, a location that became a financial centre to rival the Square Mile.
‘It was on our turf, we felt like it could be ours,’ he wrote, and vowed that one day he would work there.
The middle of three children, he excelled at maths at Ilford County High, a grammar school, but was too poor to afford to go on school trips.
At 16, he was expelled for dealing drugs after offloading £3 worth of cannabis to a classmate and he could easily have gone on a downward path.
Instead, he knuckled down at another school, got four As at A-level and earned a place to study maths and economics at the LSE. There, he stuck out, he said, among his relatively privileged peers.
‘It seemed no Russian oligarch, no Pakistani air force commander, and no Chinese politburo member had missed the opportunity to send an ambitious son, daughter, nephew or niece over to this unremarkable corner of central London.’
Rather than being intimidated, however, he capitalised on the fact that they underestimated the boy with the working-class roots to win the trading game of his memoir’s title, a victory that opened the door to a career at Citibank.
His book tells a rip-roaring tale of cocaine, money and excess, focusing on just about everything that is wrong with the capitalist system.
Thanks to his east London accent and informal uniform of tracksuits and hoodies, he became known as ‘Gary the Geezer’ and the book chronicles his heady rise and eventual acrimonious exit from the US banking giant.
By 2011 and aged just 25, Stevenson claimed he was earning unspecified millions and had become his employer’s best trader. In an article for The Guardian, he later wrote that he had been ‘Citibank’s most profitable trader globally’.
And this bold claim has only become more colourful in the telling ever since. As he modestly put it in one of his videos: ‘I’m not here to talk about morality, OK. I was the best f****** trader in the f****** world and I’m the guy that calls it right every f****** year.’
Former colleagues, however, dispute this and other claims. More than one who was contacted by the Financial Times spoke of his ‘delusions of grandeur’.
Kent Bray, who worked on the trading desk alongside him, said he was stunned when he heard Stevenson claim to have been Citi’s top trader. ‘I contacted him, and I said: ‘Is this book fiction or non-fiction?’. And he said, ‘It’s non-fiction,’ Bray told the FT.
Yet according to Bray, who had been his mentor, Stevenson was not in the running for the title of best trader at the London branch of Citi, let alone the world.
Of the £35million Stevenson claimed to have made the bank in his best year, Bray was contemptuous. ‘It sounds like a lot of money for people not in the trade, but in all the time I was at Citibank that’s not gonna make you the most profitable trader globally,’ he said.
Another described the young Gary as ‘OK’ but not ‘exceptional’, adding: ‘He wasn’t even close to being one of the stars.’
This individual said Stevenson’s claim about being the best in any one year ‘is laughable and clearly just an outlandish fib’.
One of his former bosses, meanwhile, suggested that – though he had ‘talent and smarts’ – Gary was not even among the top 20 to 25 dealers that made up Citibank’s ‘short-term interest rate trading’ desk.
More pertinently these ex-colleagues insist that there was no way Stevenson could have known he was top trader. He claimed the figures were available on an internal website; they maintain they were not.
So, what about his boast that, while others assumed economic recovery and interest rate rises were on the way, he saw things differently after observing the cost of living pain of his family and friends and bet the other way.
This is a key thread in his narrative as it helps to explain his switch to campaigning on economic inequality today. Old workmates say there were plenty of other traders who took a similar approach.
Does this make him a false prophet and do the questions about his past actually matter? Stevenson was certainly a success, particularly considering his background. It doesn’t seem to have affected his popularity with his supporters who revere his iconoclasm.
What about that comparison with Andrew Tate, whose brand of toxic masculinity has brought him a global following?
In a Guardian interview, Stevenson, who like Tate was born in 1986, has this to say: ‘Andrew Tate is seeing the same things I am seeing. Politics is dying…There is a battle of ideas in society. There is a battle of ideas on the Left. I’m putting my pitch forward, I’m going to build something about inequality, taxing the rich, and I’m going to build it on YouTube.’
When I approached him as he left the stage at this week’s protest, he grabbed me by the shoulders and said: ‘I’m not doing it for you but for your kids. We can win.’ If Labour ministers are as taken by Stevenson’s proposals as he appears to think they are, it won’t be long before we find out if that is true.
Additional reporting from Simon Trump
