Do we like them?

Do we like James Dyson?

Our score: 6 out of 10. A clean harm record and real charity, set against a settled forced-labour suit, two lost libel claims and a lobbying row.

Dyson is the British inventor who built the company that carries his name, and he has been one of the UK's loudest business voices for years. In 2019 he moved the company's head office to Singapore, a year after backing Brexit, which is where most of his bad press starts. The company said the move was about growth, not Brexit or tax. Where you land on that depends on whether you see shrewd business or a bloke who wanted it both ways.

That second reading is exactly what a Daily Mirror column put to readers in 2022, calling him a hypocrite who had “screwed” Britain. Dyson sued for libel and lost in December 2023. The judge found the paper had defended the column as honest opinion, and that Dyson hadn't shown serious harm. It was a pricey way to learn that being called a hypocrite is, legally, just an opinion.

The heavier story is Malaysia. In 2022, 24 migrant workers from Nepal and Bangladesh sued Dyson companies in London, alleging forced labour at a factory run by a supplier, ATA, with wages unlawfully deducted and beatings for missed targets. Dyson denied it and said the workers were employed by a third-party supplier. His Malaysian subsidiary had cancelled the contract with ATA in 2021. The case settled in February 2026 with no admission of liability. Earlier, a judge threw out his libel claim against Channel 4 over its coverage of the workers' claims, saying the broadcast was “simply not about him”.

Then there's the 2020 ventilator saga. Leaked texts showed Dyson pressing Boris Johnson over a tax assurance for staff working on ventilators, and Johnson replying that he would fix it, which sparked a lobbying row. Dyson denied trying to “extract favours”, said he'd met Johnson only three times, and called the BBC's description of him as a Tory donor a “grotesque mischaracterisation”. The ventilators never went into full production.

On the harm test, there's nothing ugly here. He has argued that overseas students who come to study engineering and science should be able to stay on after graduating, in what City AM called a veiled dig at Conservative immigration plans. We found no statement from him on trans issues, so we can't tell you more than that. His fights over Labour's inheritance tax changes, which he called “spiteful”, are a money argument that critics read as self-interest, since he owns a big farming business.

The good stuff is real. His foundation gave £12 million to set up the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London, and he said the aim was to create engineers who are “bold and commercially astute”. That is a long-running habit of putting serious money into the next generation of engineers, not a one-off PR gesture. The record is thin on other causes, so that's honestly most of the list.