There were six empty wine bottles strewn over the floor of Joan Collins's lavish St Tropez villa as a very hungover Ivan Massow sloped down to breakfast. And it wasn't the star of Dynasty who had been knocking back the vino in large quantities. "Ivan, I had just one glass last night. Nearly all the rest must have been you," she told him. "I think you have a problem and it's time for you to do something about it."
Three years later – via a prolonged stay at the celebrity rehab hangout Promises in Los Angeles – Massow thanks his "second mum" for rescuing him from the alcoholic haze that followed a failed £13m court case against insurance company Zurich. The bedside bottle of vodka (he hasn't drunk since 2008) has gone, swapped for hour-long jogs along the Thames at dawn, and a weekly Alcoholics Anonymous group he chairs in Soho. And on Monday the serial entrepreneur, now 43, opens an intriguing and cheeky new finance firm that will throw him back into the business and media spotlight once again.
The night in 2002 when Massow was sacked as chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) marked perhaps the peak of his notoriety. In a New Statesman article he had labelled most conceptual art as "pretentious, self-indulgent craftless tat that I wouldn't accept even as a gift". Furious ICA staff signed a petition calling for his head, and two weeks later he was fired. "I was live on BBC News at the time when it came through. But Mick Jagger happened to be watching, and liked what I was saying. He came down in his limo and invited me to a party. Oddly enough, Nick Serota [director of the Tate] was there, so I went up to him and said 'I've been fired.' He said: 'About time, too,' turned around and walked off."
Massow first hit the headlines in 1990, aged 23, when, with just a few pounds in the bank and living in a Kentish Town squat, he set up Britain's first financial advisory firm aimed at gay clients. Amid rising HIV rates, he became an outspoken crusader for gay men denied mortgages and insurance, or who were being charged premium increases of 600% or more.
He left school at 16 (surviving a seriously fractured childhood) with just one O-level in metalwork, but has always possessed an instinct for self-publicity. A series of guerilla poster campaigns, one showing Massow embracing then-boyfriend Jamie, taunted insurance giant Allied Dunbar over its TV adverts. "For the life you don't want Allied Dunbar to know about," it proclaimed. Massow swiftly became one of the brightest attractions in the capital's "faggerati", his business took off and his personal fortune soared.
Still in his 20s, undeniably handsome, adored by the media and with millions of pounds in his pocket, he began flirting with politics. To the surprise of many of his left-leaning clients, he came out as a Tory, and for a brief spell in the 1990s shared a Mayfair home with the current secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, and Nicholas Boles, now MP for Grantham and Stamford. "We all just really liked each other, had the same sort of politics and the same sort of dream for the Conservative party."
He was determined on change from within for a party that was still attached to the homophobic Section 28. "At Conservative central office you'd be forgiven for thinking it was compulsory to be gay. All the individuals I spoke too there were completely open-minded, but they just thought the electorate wouldn't be able to stomach it."
The sight of Massow at his 17th century Queen Anne mansion in Somerset, head to toe in fox-hunting gear and surrounded by Tory grandees, horrified many in the gay community but failed to dent his business. By 1997 Massow's was the tenth largest financial advice firm in the country, and his fortune was estimated at north of £20m. By 1999, he was Baroness Thatcher's official companion at the Tory party conference.
Yet Massow now dates his slide into addiction to the day in 1996 when his boyfriend Jamie, a manic depressive, committed suicide. "I started to go off the rails from then. I was only 27 when he died. And I seemed to have lots of people in my life who were dying. Elton John used to joke that those days were like four funerals and a wedding. I felt like I was going to a funeral almost every week."
His new boyfriend, a commodities trader, became immensely rich, with a little help from Ivan's own cash. It fuelled an extravagance and "vacuousness" he looks back on almost, though not quite, shamefacedly. "Yes, I'd already been used to a bit of excess. I'd been pictured next to the odd Ferrari. But this was on a completely different level. We wouldn't rent a suite at a hotel, but the entire floor. We took private jets everywhere. I drank too much – and other stuff – and it all got out of hand. And I took my eye off the main ball, my business."
His financial advice firm began to sag, and despite a series of mergers and refinancings, soon faced collapse. In a stunning reversal of his earlier campaign against Allied Dunbar, he accepted around £330,000 from Dunbar's parent company, Zurich, to become its agent. "I now realise I was looking for the easy option, but actually I was completely screwed over." Zurich, he alleges, refused to issue cover to the bulk of his clients, gay men, and his business folded. He began legal action against Zurich, claiming it had wrecked his business through misrepresentation. But Zurich, which denied being homophobic, fiercely rejected all Massow's allegations, and the court ruled against him.
Massow says that in the aftermath, he "switched the lights out" and left the country. Although media reports suggested he was bankrupt, in truth he moved to a Renaissance-style palazzo in Barcelona, replete with chapel and ballroom. "I wanted to go somewhere no one recognised me. I hate the phrase, but I sort of wanted to find myself. It lasted four years. I'd have a late lunch with a few friends which would turn into a very boozy lunch. I somehow needed to do it. I drank and drank. I just let go. I don't think I realised just how bad things were becoming. In some ways I look back at how carefree I was, but it was a complete waste of my life. I became selfish and my world was very small. I was drunk, pallid and lardy. If I'd carried on I would have been dead by my mid-40s."
He returned to the UK, via rehab, two years ago. Since then he has been putting together a new business, returning to his roots in financial services. It launches next week and at its heart is finding a way for consumers to grab back thousands of pounds in commission earned by financial advisers in the past. Traditional financial advisers will be appalled. "This is not a business just in the gay market; it's something that reflects my style, at the ICA, or in politics. I like a noise, I like a punch-up. I could never run a franchise for a pizza chain – I need a business that reflects the sort of person I am. Massow the advice firm started with less than £5,000 from a squat. This one is more like £5m than £5,000."
His return to business also sees a return to Tory politics. In 2000, little more than a year after escorting Thatcher at the party conference, he quit the Conservatives, angry with the continued stand on Section 28 and defected to Labour. In an interview at the time, he told the Guardian that Thatcher "is completely doolally, a bonkers old bird who says the wrong thing at every possible moment". Yet a decade later, Massow is back on the Conservative party's "approved candidates list", from which it chooses potential MPs. "I knew if I switched it would be front page news. I thought it would help the party focus on repealing Section 28. I had one meeting with Labour, that's all. I never wanted to be a candidate."
That nose for publicity has never left him. It's timely that in October, as his new business opens, Channel 4 will screen an episode of The Secret Millionaire (in which wealthy people go undercover in deprived areas to find out who needs their help) featuring Massow living on a sink estate somewhere in the north of England. He adds, though, that: "They asked me more than a year ago. I had no idea when the transmission time would be. But it is very good timing." The question of Massow's millions – and whether they ever really existed – has always intrigued interviewers. He refuses to put a figure on his wealth. But on his return to Britain he bought a house in London's Clerkenwell for £1.2m and sold it last December for £5m, pocketing a gain of more than £3m.
His eventual rescuer, Joan Collins, is now his closest friend. "In the last two months I've been on holiday with her three times. Whenever we're travelling people come up to her. The Duchess of York came to sit with us for lunch. And Ivana Trump." But just a few sentences later he insists he's not impressed by celebrity. "Nobody is these days, are they?"
CV
1967 Born Ivan Field in Brighton.
1979 Given up for adoption aged 12 after parents split.
1983 Leaves school with one O-level, works for Friends Provident insurance company in Bristol.
1990 Opens Massow Financial Services from a squat in north London with just a mobile phone.
1997 Business grows to become one of the 10 biggest financial advice firms in the UK, with 120 employees at its peak. Company valued at more than £20m.
1999 Becomes chairman of Institute of Contemporary Arts. Sacked in 2002.
2002 A merger creates Rainbow Massow but it quickly goes into receivership.
2003 Takes payment to become agent of Zurich. Business folds and unsuccessful legal action begins. Bid to become mayor of London fails .
2005 Moves to Barcelona.
2011 After returning to UK launches new business focused on returning "renewal" commission to customers.