Keith Harris: football's Mr Fixit

Chairman of investment bank Seymour Pierce, Keith Harris is arguably "the most influential man in British football".

The general public may not recognise him, but Keith Harris is arguably "the most influential man in British football", says Duncan White in The Sunday Telegraph. Harris, the 55-year-old chairman of investment bank Seymour Pierce, is the dealmaker behind the Premier League's biggest takeovers. As "happy chatting to his good mate Terry Venables as he is swapping canaps with City blue bloods", says Andrew Davidson in The Times, Harris welcomed Roman Abramovich at Chelsea Village, ushered Randy Lerner into Villa Park, and handled Thaksin Shinawatra's purchase of Manchester City and the takeover of West Ham by Eggert Magnusson. Mike Ashley recently charged him with handling the sale of Newcastle United and Bill Kenwright has asked him to find a billionaire buyer for Everton Football Club.

Harris's role as football's Mr Fixit is just a small part of his work as well as his role at Seymour Pierce, he's on the board of several companies, including Halfords and Wembley National Stadium. But football has always been a big motivator. A devoted Manchester United fan, as a child the game gave Harris an escape from a "pretty difficult environment" in Stockport. As an economics student at Bradford University he played semi-professional football with Bradford Park Avenue. A first-class degree earned him an offer of a Masters scholarship from Oxford. But Harris didn't think he would be "socially comfortable" and went to Surrey University to do a PhD. After university, a career in investment banking beckoned. Harris found a job at Morgan Grenfell and swiftly rose to become the bank's youngest-ever director at 30. He moved to Drexel Burnham Lambert, then Apax Partners, before being headhunted in 1994 by HSBC. He became CEO of the group's investment banking unit, overseeing a workforce of 7,000. He resigned reportedly by mutual consent in 1999, and took up the chairmanship of Seymour Pierce.

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.