Clive Hollick, Baron Hollick

Clive Richard Hollick, Baron Hollick (born 20 May 1945) is a British businessman with media interests, and a supporter of the Labour Party.

Hollick was born in Southampton, the son of Olive Mary (née Scruton) and Leslie George Hollick. He was educated at Taunton's Grammar School, Southampton, and then read Politics, Psychology and Sociology at the University of Nottingham. He joined Hambros Bank as a graduate trainee in 1967 and rapidly gained a reputation as a financier and a dealmaker, becoming in 1973 the bank's youngest-ever director.

The next year Hollick became chief executive of JH Vavasseur Group, a failing moneybroker caught up in the 1973-4 secondary banking crisis. By 1978 the Vavasseur merchant bank was financially secure once again, and Hollick was building it into a successful media company, renaming the group Mills & Allen International (MAI) after taking over advertising billboard company Mills and Allen. The group continued to grow with diversification during the 1980s, expanding into market research and business information services, and buying the National Opinion Polls (NOP) group in 1989 from the Daily Mail and General Trust.

MAI moved into television in 1993 when its subsidiary Meridian Broadcasting won the ITV franchise for South and South-East England. The following year it bought Anglia Television for £292m, and in 1995 a 14.8% share in Yorkshire-Tyne Tees, and was a major shareholder in the consortium that was granted the franchise for Channel 5.

In March 1996 the group merged with United Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Express, Daily Star, and a string of local newspapers, to form United News and Media, an international media group with revenues of £2.3 billion and 16,000 employees. Many thought Hollick would meet his match in Lord Stevens of Ludgate, proprietor of United; but it was Stevens who was sidelined as Hollick became chief executive, and within 18 months the Express had undergone a radical shift of political affiliation, dropping its long-standing support for the Conservative Party to become an enthusiastic proponent of Tony Blair's New Labour.

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