Finally, Patrick Evershed is feeling vindicated. Over the past three years, the U.K. fund manager has spent some £70,000 ($137,700) of his own money on advertisements slamming the Labour Party government in daily newspapers. “Gordon Brown’s economy has been built on a mountain of debt,” Evershed, 66, warned in a recent full-page ad in a supplement to The House Magazine, which covers British politics. The ad decried what Evershed cited as a record low savings rate, a record trade deficit, record personal debt levels and out-of-control government borrowing. “People are living way beyond their means,” he frets in a telephone interview. “The government has created the credit crisis.” Evershed, manager of an £80 million-in-assets small-company fund at New Star Asset Management, heads, no surprise, the City of London branch of the opposition Conservative Party. “People used to think I was nuts,” he says. “But now they are starting to believe me. The situation is extremely dire.”
