David Hart

David Hart (4 February 1944 – 5 January 2011) was an English writer, businessman, and adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He also had a career in the 1960s as an avant-garde filmmaker. He was a controversial figure during the 1984–85 miners' strike and played a leading role in organising and funding the anti-strike campaign in the coalfields.

Early life Born at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, on 4 February 1944, the chairman/principal shareholder of the Henry Ansbacher merchant bank, which had been founded by Henry Ainsley .

Hart was educated at Eton until his expulsion in his fourth year.

By now, Hart had begun to work in property, owing £960,000 by the time of the 1975 hearing, although this was discharged in 1978. A later inheritance restored his fortunes, but he did not repay his earlier debts. He was a controversial and was instrumental in organising and funding the anti-strike campaign in the coalfields, including funding a breakaway miners union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers (UDM). His involvement in aiding working miners extended to employing former members of the SAS to protect the families of working miners and using the resources of 'the secret state'. Hart's involvement was eventually a source of bitterness for the UDM's leader Roy Lynk. and which had used "anti-gay material during their anti-Labour campaign in 1987". In 1988 he played a leading role in mobilising young activists against pro-devolution dissidents at the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party conference in Perth, Scotland.

Towards the end of Hungarian socialism, Hart channelled support from the West to the fledgling Fidesz party, which at the time was an unofficial anti-Communist student movement developing at the Eötvös Loránd University under the protection of the last Communist minister of the interior, István Horváth. The group received a visit and material support from George Soros by 1985. It was formally founded in 1988, changed into a party in 1989, and by 1990 its members were part of Hungary's new parliament.

In the autumn of 1993, he was appointed as a personal advisor to Malcolm Rifkind, Secretary of State for Defence, a position Hart retained when Michael Portillo succeeded Rifkind. Reportedly a long-standing Portillo contact, Hart is credited with writing the 'Who Dares Wins' conclusion to Portillo's 1995 Conservative Party Conference speech. He was also involved in the 1995 plan to install 40 telephones and fax machines in a Lord North Street house for a Portillo leadership challenge to Conservative leader and prime minister John Major which never emerged.

In the 2000s he was involved in the international defence industry – including being a lobbyist for BAE Systems and Boeing. In 2004 an arrest warrant for Hart was issued concerning his alleged involvement in that year's coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea. via Defence Consultancy Ltd, an anonymously registered company based in the British Virgin Islands. While BAE was under investigation for corruption at the time, Hart was not thought to have done anything illegal. Hart is also portrayed as a central protagonist on the government's side in Beth Steel's 2014 play Wonderland.

Hart himself wrote numerous plays, including Victoriana, The Little Rabbi, The Ark & the Covenant, He died of pneumonia at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds on 5 January 2011,