How a waiter named Mo survived two terrible traumas to become a billionaire and Tory party treasurer

Aged 10, he nearly lost a leg in a car accident. As a young man in America, where he was sent from Egypt at 15, he was left to survive by taking a waiting job paying $1.25 per hour. Soon after he was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Chris Blackhurst on Mohamed Mansour, the billionaire businessman and Tory party treasurer, who built it all from the bottom up

Mohamed Mansour describes himself as ‘one of the luckiest people on the planet’ (Supplied)

One of my children was once required to be in hospital, in isolation, for 10 days. He was a teenager and it was difficult. For hours, he saw no one. When we visited, he was overwhelmed to see us, desperate for company.

Thankfully, he was fine but the trauma of this episode came back while reading Drive to Succeed, the autobiography of Mohamed Mansour, the billionaire businessman and now senior Conservative Party treasurer.

My son was discharged within two weeks; after a terrible car accident that nearly saw him lose a leg, Mansour was confined to bed for almost three years. He was aged 10 when the crash happened, on Revolution Day in 1958, marking the uprising in Egypt six years earlier that toppled King Farouk. That formative period growing up, of making new friends, playing sports, was denied to Mansour.