A video loop on the homepage of Gary Neville’s new website shows the ex-Man Utd captain turned businessman, broadcaster and now BBC Dragon’s Den star in various action poses. The clip changes at such speed it’s hard to keep up without becoming nauseous. And that’s the problem with Gary the dynamic middle-aged wannabe politician-tycoon: he makes everyone feel a bit sick. Neville is in the football stand cheering on his team, decked out in an expensive suit fielding questions from an adoring audience and zooming around Manchester in his car. He’s like a luxury watch model but the looks aren’t quite there.

‘Relentless’ is Neville’s slogan and the name of his lucrative investment business. It’s his philosophy, his mantra, and it’s plastered all over his promotional material, along with other student poster platitudes.

‘Attack the Day’

‘Success? Yes. Failure? Yes. Stop? No’.

‘Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo’

‘No excuses, no shortcuts, no regrets’.

It’s a litany of self-congratulation: ‘I was raised by my parents and taught by my coaches to do everything I could, to get to where I wanted to be’.

There’s no point being churlish. Neville has won Premier League trophies, made a fortune as a businessman and is now turning his hand to starring in Dragon’s Den. But what do Neville’s slogans do other than puff up his sense of his own greatness?

Neville is clearly on a mission, but what is it? ‘Businessman. Broadcaster. Speaker. Charity’ his website proclaims, bordering on the Alan Partridge. Might there, in time, be another word added to that list: politician?

Neville has always poured cold water on that idea: he has ‘no intention of going into politics’, we’ve been told. Really? He’s all too keen to share his views on politicians. He says he chose to speak out during the pandemic after then health secretary Matt Hancock told footballers to take a pay cut and ‘play their part’.

‘[This] brought me to life,’ he told the Guardian, ‘and sparked me into speaking politically, you know… footballers aren’t the people we should be attacking here.’

Since then, Neville has appeared at Labour conference and urged people to back the party’s leader Keir Starmer. He is a ‘serious politician,’ Neville told delegates.

Yet there’s another politician to whom Neville bears a curious resemblance to in his restlessness: Margaret Thatcher. It was sheer hard work that got Thatcher, first to Oxford, then to the top of the Tory party. Her determination and single-mindedness kept her in power.

‘I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist,’ Neville told the world on Instagram in 2022. ‘I believe in entrepreneurialism. I believe in companies making profit. I believe in lower taxes. As Damian Reilly has already pointed out on Coffee House, ‘these are sentiments with which Margaret Thatcher herself would have nodded in ecstatic assent – particularly when uttered from the lips of a working-class boy done good from the north of England.’

Even Thatcher’s critics would concede that she was, to adopt Neville’s word, ‘relentless’. Throw in a bit of Blairism – Neville is, like Peter Mandelson, intensely relaxed about getting very rich – and you have a future party leader in the making. As a reality TV man on Dragons Den, Neville might prove not just the heir to Thatcher but Britain’s answer to Donald Trump. Watch this space.