Donald Trump wants to build a billion-dollar resort on a rural Scottish shore. But he’ll have to do battle with this man first — who says he won’t budge for love or money
After thousands of years of continuous human settlement, something interesting has happened in Balmedie. The locals don’t know where to look. Camera crews from America have arrived; tourists have eaten at their chippy; reporters with strange accents have booked rooms in their only hotel.
The unusual attention is all because of a man most people in this Aberdeenshire backwater have never met: Michael Forbes, the fisherman who defied Donald Trump. It is a story that has been likened to the 1983 film Local Hero – in which an American oil billionaire attempts to buy the property rights to a Scottish village in order to build a refinery, only to be stymied by a grubby beachcomber who will not sell his land – but life is never as neat as Hollywood.
True, Trump, the follically absurd American property developer, entrepreneur and star of the US version of The Apprentice, is, like Local Hero’s billionaire Felix Happer, a self-caricature. His plan for a huge golf, hotel, timeshare and spa development in 1,400 acres of farm and parkland just north of Balmedie is in keeping with his fondness for Freudian displays of affluence. The Washington Post once said that “everything in Trumpworld is fabulous, or in first place, or better looking, or richer, or taller, or it has bigger breasts,” and the Trump International Golf Links will be no different.
In a region where a two-floor farmhouse is considered a provocation to the elements, Trump’s 450-room gothic hotel will stand 10 storeys high. There will be 950 holiday-home “units”. The conference centre will be 10,000 sq ft. Its golf course, which Trump hopes will one day hold the Open championship or the Ryder Cup, will be “the best golf course in the world”. At the heart of the estate is Menie House, a 14th-century baronial home that “the Donald” (as his first wife, Ivana, styled him) bought two years ago – a suitably grand base for his lairdly plans.
His adversary Michael Forbes, meanwhile, is, like Local Hero’s Ben Knox, a quiet sort, and a little rough around the edges. But the similarities end there. Now 55, Forbes’s life story shows not a dreamer, but a man intimately aware of the changing landscape around him. A fisherman at heart, Forbes has, to keep his head above water, variously worked the rigs, the quarry and his land. The reasons he won’t sell that land – which sits plumb in the middle of Trump’s proposed site – are as much to do with the American and what he represents as with the land itself.
And Balmedie? It is not, as some have wished it to be, a quiet village where everyone knows each other’s business. The town itself, a Barratt Homes symphony in brown and grey, is a commuter spot with 2,000 residents tucked between the A90 dual carriageway and the sea. Its residents drive shiny new cars and work in Aberdeen. When they meet, at the Co-op or the White Horse for a pint, they generally agree that Trump is a damn fine thing. “Think of our house prices,” they say, or: “I’ll certainly use the spa.”
North of Balmedie, where the A90 slims into a two-lane road, is an older community – albeit one that spends little time together except for a shared nip at Hogmanay – comprising farms and cottages backed up against the rolling dunes. This is where Forbes lives. Up here, the mood towards Trump is more ambiguous. Indeed, one group of residents, led by the genial, chain-smoking former Clash producer Mickey Foote, has been at the vanguard of opposing the Trump invasion. Calling themselves Sustainable Aberdeenshire, Foote’s gang find themselves outnumbered (letters to the council approving the scheme outweigh objections three-to-one) but not out-shouted. Indeed, addressing such issues as the fact that the development contravenes the region’s housing plan and that the back nine holes of Trump’s proposed “greatest golf course in the world” run straight over a sand dome – part of an environmentally sensitive mobile dune system, and protected Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) – Foote will oppose any planning approval with legal action, and, if needs be, will lobby for a public enquiry.
It will be a lonely battle. Trump’s PR machine, which has promised a £1 billion investment in the area, has been so effective that not only is much of the region thoroughly in favour, but so are Scotland’s politicians. Before Trump went public with his proposition, the erstwhile First Minister Jack McConnell’s private meeting with Trump, to give the Trump organisation a “direct line into the government in Scotland”, was exposed by Scotland on Sunday. Although Alex Salmond has been more circumspect, he too has indicated his willingness for the project to succeed. Indeed, Salmond attended a dinner with Trump in New York this year, on a trip to promote foreign investment in Scotland.
Against this, what chance for the antis? “When Trump came to Scotland last,” says Don Banks, an objector whose house will back onto the new development, “he was practically carried shoulder-high through the streets… It seems that everyday people are subject to normal planning rules and restrictions, but Trump is not.”
Oddly, it was Trump who made Forbes a hero. The American had flown into Scotland at the beginning of October after a series of objections from disgruntled locals had threatened to derail the procession to planning approval. At a press conference, Trump cracked, saying Forbes’s land was “in total disrepair”. “Take a look and see how badly maintained that piece of property is,” he said. “It’s disgusting. There are rusty tractors, rusty oil cans. I actually asked him, ‘Are you doing this on purpose to try and make me look bad, so I have to pay some more money?’ ”
The Mill of Menie, Forbes’s farm, could, it must be said, do with a lick of paint. On the single-lane drive down to the property, one is struck by the homespun chaos of the place. In the centre, there is a small house, where Forbes lives with his wife, Sheila. Beyond that is a mobile home, or “chalet” as Forbes calls it, where his 83-year-old mother, Molly, lives. In front of the house lie hulking barns filled with farm gear, and equipment for restoring vintage trucks – a hobby of Forbes’s nephew. On the outside of one of the barns, a slogan reading “No Golf Course” has been daubed in angry red letters.
Having made Forbes two offers – one of £350,000 and one of £375,000, including a job worth £50,000 a year at the new resort – Trump has given up. He says he doesn’t need Forbes’s land, and his representative in Aberdeenshire, project manager Neil Hobday, says that if Forbes doesn’t sell, his presence will add to the local charm and become a “curiosity”. Really? Forbes’s land is directly adjacent to the front nine holes of the proposed golf course, and between the links and the hotel. It’s hard to imagine Sergio Garcia lining up a putt next to a flock of squawking chickens and a sign saying “No Golf Course”.
Forbes meets me in his mother’s place (which Molly has named Paradise). Thick-set and red-faced, his arm is in plaster, after ligament damage caused from a lifetime of “hauling and pulling”. Forbes is now on sick leave from his normal job, as an assistant manager at the quarry in Belhelvie, but in the past he has worked on the rigs for the French oil-detection company Schlumberger, and fished on the trawlers. Between February and August, he always works his coastal salmon fishing spot – although, last season, he caught only one salmon and one trout in six months.
When I tell him that many of his neighbours think he is just holding out for money – one even said he was “loving the attention” – Forbes laughs. “Och, they can think what they like. I know the truth.” And what is the truth? If Trump came to him with an open chequebook and asked him to name his price, would he ever sell?
“Never,” he says. “Never to Trump. Someone else, I might consider. In the beginning, I never minded about a golf course. As long as they don’t damage the dunes, it doesn’t bother me. But I don’t agree with the hotel and houses. They should be building houses young folk who’ve just been married can afford, not for the rich.”
Forbes, it is clear from his CV, is a pragmatic soul. He may have long roots here – his great-grandfather grew up by the quarry in Belhelvie and his family have been in the area ever since – but he is not so wedded to the land he could not spend weeks offshore making money with Schlumberger. But he is sure about his stand against Trump. When Trump first bought in the area, at a time when many locals were counting the forthcoming fortune from their house sales, Forbes was asked by a reporter from the local Evening Express if he would ever sell. He said no. What about for £1.5m, they asked. He said: “I’d maybe think about it for a couple of minutes, then I’d say no.” The story the following evening ran that he would sell for £1.5m. But, says Forbes, he has always been adamant to stay. Why?
“It’s the hassle he’s given me,” says Forbes. “He tried to stop my access to the beach. It might be a coincidence, but I’ve also had people down here asking me whether I’ve got a licence for my shotgun. We’ve had the RSPCA down here, asking whether we’re treating our animals right [Forbes keeps chickens, cats and geese as pets]. And we had environmental health down, asking whether the old tanker at the back of the land was full of diesel. It’s not – it’s full of water. We use it for our vintage rallies.
“I knew what kind of people they were the first time I met them… George Sorial [Trump’s US lawyer] invited me up to the big house about three months back, and offered me £350,000 for everything. I said, ‘What? I could build one house on my land and sell it for that.’ Sorial said, ‘We’ll make sure that never happens.’ I thought, ‘So that’s the way you want to play it, is it?’
“People like Trump, they don’t understand that there are some people who don’t want lots of money. I’ve worked hard all my life to get this place and to keep it. What would I do with lots of money at my time of life?”
Forbes takes me from his land, across a strip of Trump property, to the dunes and then the beach. Even in the flat grey light that settles on Scotland’s east coast during winter, the wispy long grass and the sand throw off a sparkle. The beach, which runs 10 miles from the Bridge of Don to the Ythan Estuary, is deserted. A curious seal bobs near the shore. Forbes grows reflective. “When I tell people I only caught one salmon and one trout this year, they ask why I do it. I say, ‘It’s in my blood.’ When you’ve grown up fishing, you have to fish. I remember a day in the 1970s when my uncle and I caught 500 salmon off four nets. I think the seals are maybe coming in too close now. But I still feel the same. I have to fish.”
Forbes, though, could sell his land at Menie and still fish a patch he owns three miles up the beach. A more compelling reason for staying is his mother. “When my dad died of cancer nine years ago, my mum was living on her own,” he says. “She was heartbroken. I said she should come and live with me, but she says, ‘I’m not biding with you, son.’ We came to a compromise. I got her the chalet. And now she’s like a kid again. I wouldn’t change that for anything.”
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Neil Hobday, Trump’s man at Menie House, is the anti-Forbes. With his Trump International Golf Links splash-proof top (a garment he will hope is not hubristic), and his fulsome cheeks, he looks like a plumper, balder version of David Cameron. In fact, he was educated at Fettes with Tony Blair, whom he remembers as “not a team sports sort of person”.
Hobday rebuffs each and every objection to the proposed development with professional ease. The sand dome they are intending to turn into nine holes of golf is not an environmental jewel but “a menace – sand that blew in off the beach”. Trump, he says, will do everyone a favour by planting grass on top of it. The hotel will not only be glorious, but absolutely necessary. “This area is pathetic,” he says. “It has so few hotels. Every room in Aberdeen is booked. Oil executives are bussed to Dundee, to stay the night, because everywhere is so full in Aberdeen… We’ll be booked round the year.”
Although Hobday says this project “starts and finishes with golf”, he will admit the accountants saw no way to make the development make enough money without the hundreds of homes that will also be built on the site. But, I suggest, it was never in the local housing plan to build so many expensive houses in this area. How has Trump persuaded the local council (who are positive about his planning application) that Balmedie needs this development?
“Currently there is nothing in the local plan to accommodate our housing requirement, that’s true. But you should realise that [a local council] can only imagine so much will happen in the future. They could never have predicted this would come to Aberdeenshire – not in a month of Sundays – a £1 billion investment… here!”
It is the Trump organisation’s manner that has most irked the antis. Before the plans were even on the table, for instance, several locals received a visit from someone calling himself Peter White, who expressed an interest in buying their house. Peter White turned out to be Neil Peter White Hobday. Why the cloak and dagger?
“If they’d known I was from Trump, they’d have raised their prices,” says Hobday, without a hint of embarrassment. “More importantly, it was a confidentiality issue. It was important that no one knew about Mr Trump’s investment here. It’s standard practice in US development that you make a few confidential enquiries round a proposed development.”
The trouble is, even when Hobday and Project Trump have been playing with their real names, they’ve faced accusations of dissembling. One farmer, Mike Ingram – who back in the early 1980s sold Forbes his 23 acres for £24,000 – sold Trump a large swathe of farmland, under the impression it was going to be used as a “buffer zone”. It now emerges this land is going to be used for residential development, and Ingram is irked that he did not get a fair price.
“He did a deal,” says Hobday. “He’s a farmer, a landowner, a businessman. He sold land. It doesn’t matter if I’d told him I want to build a hospital on it, or I want it for housing, or I want it for a buffer zone. He sold it. He was a willing seller. So for him to be crying his eyes out now…”
Such is the way with development, and such is Trump’s desire for a mighty golf complex in this exact spot. But why here? Trump has made much, recently, of his Scottish mother, Mary, who came from the Isle of Lewis. There is, it seems, no ancestor from Aberdeenshire. Still, Trump is set on Balmedie.
“What it came down to,” says Hobday, “is we wanted to build a fabulous course that could host the Open.” [Remember the Trump motto: fabulous, first place, better looking, richer, taller, bigger breasts]. “We looked all over Europe, but with Mr Trump being half-Scottish and Scotland being the home of golf, this was his first choice. Eventually, we found the perfect spot. The site attributes here are spectacular. There’s nowhere else in Britain or Ireland that has the natural topography that this place does. It’s near a major city, so good infrastructure. Near an airport. We think a golf course here would be capable of fulfilling all the criteria for the R and A [golf’s governing body and the hosts of the Open].”
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Hobday is right. The “site attributes” – what you and I call the countryside – are bleak and haunting and very beautiful. A golf course or two would please many people, especially the legions of Americans with Scottish grandmothers who arrive in “the home of golf” every year to walk about in the rain.
It will not, however, please Mickey Foote, whose house looks out on this wilderness but will soon look out onto a 10-year development site. Foote’s mother used to live in his cottage and, in his pre-Clash childhood years, he used to come to Balmedie often. Now the owner of a waste-management franchise in London, he had hopes of retiring here.
“At first, I don’t think any of us were really worried about it,” he says. “It seemed like a golf course, a hotel, and associated paraphernalia, which didn’t seem like the worst thing. I’m not a golfer, but that didn’t bother me. The development was going to cost £300m. Then, suddenly, the investment sky-rocketed. Suddenly, they were talking about this billion-pound thing. A few of us thought, ‘Hang on, this isn’t a golf course we’re talking about – this is a marketing exercise in selling luxury homes.’ ”
Hobday certainly suggests that the golf course on its own could not sustain itself financially. Trump says “the golf course is the amenity that makes it all work. Frankly, it’s the thing I’m most interested in, but if we don’t have the houses or the hotel it doesn’t work”. Either way, Foote is determined that Trump be called to account for the way he has trampled over local housing, environmental and structural plans.
Foote’s concerns have struck a note with a number of people in the local rural community. One farmer, Raymond Davidson, who keeps sheep and runs a horse-livery business out of the farm just north of Trump’s land, is incensed. “I can’t put a spade in the ground in the dunes, because it’s an SSSI,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to either, because I like it how it is. But what’s the use of rules if they only apply to some people?”
“I can’t believe that he’s going to get permission for this,” Davidson continues. “A planning application for one house was turned down just recently on the A90. One house! And [Trump] wants to build 900! It won’t ruin my life if he builds it, but it’s the principle of the thing. That the rules only apply if you aren’t rich.”
But Foote’s gripes, it seems, have not spread as far as the town of Balmedie, where most people are either apathetic or in favour.
“It seems like everyone has been caught up in the spin,” says Foote. “They think, ‘Great – Donald’s here! We’re going to have Disneyland!’ They don’t think about how the area’s going to change. Part of that is the attitude up here. There is a part of the Aberdeenshire mindset that is very forelock-tugging. I think it might be something to do with having the royal family nearby, but people can’t see beyond the big man – the celebrity. They’re not cynical.”
When the local Foveran Applications Committee approved the proposal on November 20, before sending it down to the “infrastructure committee” on November 30, they saw an application with many caveats. Environmentalists are concerned about building on the sand dome, the RSPB are worried about the effect on two species of rare birds, and the council committee have concerns about whether the area can take the sheer scale of the operation. But all will have been balanced by what is called the “considerable economic benefits” of the development. If the scheme gets the final go-ahead from the Scottish government, work could start in January.
Here, it seems, is the crux of the matter. This scheme, this feud, this ruffle of feathers, does not start and end with golf – it starts and ends with money. Aberdeenshire at present is one of the most affluent places in Britain. It has next to no unemployment. And even if there were mass unemployment, one suspects that the 1,400 jobs Trump has promised would not be taken by local people. How many Brits does one now see working in British hotels? So the area might not need a massive development. But nagging at the back of people’s minds is what they see through the passenger window as they drive from Balmedie to the city. The sea is not the bounty chest it once was. Aberdeen may still call itself the oil capital of Europe – its hotel clocks may still tick to Aberdeen and Houston time – but in 30 years, the black gold will be as good as gone.
Is that what this is about? Lorna Jack, a representative of Scottish Enterprise, a body that has gently paved the way for Trump’s proposal, said that Trump’s project could be as economically significant as the discovery of North Sea oil. Perhaps the notion has stuck.
What might strike you as odd is that Trump – with his acquisitive American braggadocio and alabaster teeth – has been welcomed with open arms, while the local boy, Forbes, is treated with cynicism. It shouldn’t. They may live in less splendid houses, they may drive themselves to work, they may have less pneumatic spouses, but when it comes to ambition, the good people of Balmedie have more in common with “the Donald” than they might care to admit.