My lunch with Frank Warren – ‘Who are we to lecture the Saudis on anything?’

Forthright British boxing promoter pulls no punches on trans controversies, immigration and sportswashing accusations aimed at Riyadh

George is everything you would hope for in a Mayfair private members’ club, right down to the opulent art deco bar and the David Hockney paintings lining the walls. Frank Warren, as a man who cherishes the oft-neglected custom of a long, liquid lunch, has reserved the corner table. At “72 years young”, as he likes to put it, he has lost none of the chutzpah that has sustained him as the most famous boxing promoter in Britain. Here is a figure who has been shot, with a bullet from a Luger missing his heart by an inch, and who would have boarded the PanAm flight blown up over Lockerbie if he had made it to the airport on time. Today, he is remedying the vestiges of a nasty bout of flu in the only way he knows – with a Bloody Mary.
We are meeting in what are, to put it mildly, unexpected circumstances. A fortnight earlier I had arrived at Wembley Stadium for Anthony Joshua’s all-British heavyweight clash with Daniel Dubois, promoted by Warren, only to find myself turned away at the door. It was not so much the indignity of having a press pass revoked for the first time in 20 years that grated as the fact that it had happened because of a critical column I had written about Saudi Arabia, the kingdom bankrolling the fight. “What happened to you was unfortunate,” says Warren, as we choose our starters. “I wasn’t aware of it. What’s wrong is that you go there, having had your credential confirmed, and you’re not allowed in. I’ve never banned anyone.”
The decision to deny access was taken not by Queensberry, Warren’s company, but by PRs working directly for the Saudis – a grim precedent given that this event was staged in London, in a society treating a free press as sacrosanct. Warren, to give credit where due, has since handled the situation with old-school decency: he called immediately to apologise, and has since arranged this lunch at his favourite haunt so that we can discuss the Saudi takeover of sport in greater depth. “We’ll talk about whatever you like,” he says, when I check if everything can be on the record. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”
For 3½ hours, Warren is true to his word. What begins as a robust defence of the much-lampooned decision to play the Saudi national anthem at England’s national stadium, despite no Saudi boxers headlining, soon morphs into a diagnosis of all the ills of his own country. “Who are we to lecture them about anything?” he demands, bristling at criticisms of a Saudi regime hell-bent on controlling boxing through its bottomless sovereign wealth fund. “We give people three-year jail sentences just for saying things online. And then we plan to let 40,000 prisoners out. How do you feel about that? I know how I feel about it.”
Warren, the son of a bookmaker, found his way into boxing by accident, promoting his first bout only as a favour to his second cousin, the former bareknuckle fighter Lenny “the Guv’nor” McLean. His stable would grow to encompass a veritable almanack of British boxing greats, from Frank Bruno to Nigel Benn, Ricky Hatton to Tyson Fury. But rarely has business boomed so dramatically as with the Saudis’ entry into the sport, with Fury understood to have earned £100 million from his defeat this year by Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk in Riyadh.
If the money has redrawn the negotiating landscape, it has also reshaped Warren’s view of the world. While he has only recently visited Saudi Arabia, he is already prepared to act as the place’s staunchest advocate. Even when I suggest to him that many journalists are uneasy about boxing’s genuflection to the Gulf state – in light of the report by US intelligence agencies that Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered with a bone saw on the orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – he backtracks not an inch. “It was six years ago,” he shrugs. “It didn’t stop Donald Trump or Boris Johnson going over there straight afterwards to do business. So it’s OK for governments and for huge global companies, but not for us? What are we supposed to do?”
Warming to his theme, Warren highlights how boxing has hardly been averse to consorting with dictatorships before. Muhammad Ali’s 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle”, no less, was enabled by Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocratic rule in Zaire, while the “Thrilla in Manila” the following year was orchestrated by Ferdinand Marcos, at a time when the Philippines president governed by martial law. As such, Warren has few qualms about accepting the Saudis’ patronage. On the contrary, he labels any concerns about the sometimes muted atmosphere at Riyadh fight nights as “borderline racist”.
So passionate is he on the subject, I ask if he is similarly politically engaged back home in Britain. It proves a light-the-blue-touchpaper moment. “I am,” he says. “I’m appalled that we are proposing things like taking the winter fuel allowance away from people who have paid their taxes their entire working lives – when, on the other hand, we are paying for illegal asylum-seekers to stay in hotels for years, when it’s costing millions a day. It’s disgraceful. If these people are seeking asylum for genuine reasons and have gone through the proper channels, then fine, we should help. We have been guilty ourselves of destabilising countries and leaving them in a mess.
“But by encouraging illegal immigrants, all you’re doing is saying to the gangs who are sending them over here: ‘Just keep doing it. Make your money, because as soon as they get here, they’re all in hotels.’ There is zero consequence. And in any situation where there are no consequences, what do you expect to happen?”
While Warren, born in Islington, hails from a family of Labour voters, he laments how recent ructions have left him feeling politically homeless. He voted with enthusiasm for Tony Blair in 1997 but holds no comparable affection for Sir Keir Starmer, expressing particular disdain for the Prime Minister’s acceptance of over £100,000 free gifts and tickets since December 2019. “I’m not a big fan of Starmer’s. I wasn’t a fan of Jeremy Corbyn either – I thought he dealt terribly with the anti-Semitism in Labour. And Starmer was in the party’s higher echelons at that time.”
Warren at least has one area of common ground with Starmer, in that both are regulars in the posh seats at the Emirates Stadium. While Starmer insists that his switch to the corporate seats has been taken purely on security advice, and that he would rather be in the stands, his fellow Arsenal fan has grave doubts about the impression this sends out. “Labour don’t stand for Labour values any longer, with all these freebies,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine Jim Callaghan doing it. One of my big mates was John Brooks, Lord Brooks of Tremorfa. I got him on the British Boxing Board of Control. He was Callaghan’s agent – a proper Labour man, who redeveloped the docks in Cardiff. But they have lost their way now. All the stuff Starmer gave Boris Johnson about his personal life? Well, you are seeing the same things now. What goes around always comes around.”
Lest this be construed as a specifically anti-Labour diatribe, Warren harbours a similar degree of contempt for the other major parties. The Tories? “If you want to be a Conservative, be a bloody Conservative. Show the people what you stand for and tell them to vote for it. You can’t be a woke Conservative Party.” 
Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats? “He could have been a Butlin’s redcoat.” 
His sense of disenchantment with the modern politician is all-enveloping. “They’re a poor bunch,” he says. “There’s nothing in there that inspires me – they’re the worst of my lifetime.”
Warren, a fiercely proud Londoner to his core, explains how the capital has changed beyond recognition in his 72 years. He is conscious of the enrichment that previous waves of immigration brought to London but is adamant that today’s problems have reached a tipping point. “The floodgates have been opened,” he says. “And it is changing the fabric of our society, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t think you should have to be ashamed about being British. But if you’re a white guy, over 50 years of age, you’re starting to be treated as an outsider, as if you don’t matter.”
Does he include himself in that bracket? “Not particularly,” he smiles. “I’m lucky. I’m in a business where people want free tickets. But I do see the issue elsewhere, and I don’t think it’s right. I didn’t agree with Gary Lineker last year when he put out that tweet about the Conservatives’ asylum policy, saying it was similar to 1930s Germany. Seriously, what the f— are you talking about? Nazi Germany? We’re allowing people in, not taking their property off them. We’re a welcoming country. But we should be welcoming legal immigrants, making them go through the process. This illegal dimension is changing the dynamics around schools, housing, hospitals. It’s totally unacceptable.”
Warren is at pains, in much of what he says, to depict himself as the consummate patriot. This makes it curious, in my view, that he signed off on the decision to play the Saudi anthem at the Joshua-Dubois fight before God Save the King. While he maintains that this was simply a matter of protocol, that the host anthem at such occasions always goes second, he does not quite answer the more complex question of why the Saudis’ national song was being performed at all. Yes, they were paying for everything, in the form of “Riyadh Season”. But so too have Abu Dhabi footed every bill at Manchester City – and you do not expect to hear the anthem of the United Arab Emirates every time you visit the Etihad.
“Of course I want to be up there celebrating the British national anthem,” Warren says. “When I was growing up, Britain didn’t have a heavyweight champion of the world. Now we dominate the division. But I do think that we, as a nation, have lost something. The Iranians talk about America and other Western countries being the enemies – they don’t even mention us. We’re not there. Then you have Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, saying that we don’t have the equipment to shoot down the missiles falling on Israel. We’re a little island, but we have stood up against oppression for centuries and still maintained our identity. So, where has our standing gone?”
At this point, Warren orders some more wine. It is rare for any sporting kingmaker, let alone one as high-profile as this, to hurl himself into so many incendiary debates. But as an uninhibited talker, still working ferociously in his eighth decade, he is content to bulldoze through the culture of “wokeism”. Ask if he finds today’s sensitivities difficult to navigate, he replies: “Nah, not me. I couldn’t give a s—. And the people who keep talking about free speech should back themselves more. If you’re on TV or radio, don’t be guarded just because you’re afraid of losing your job.”
He is anything but guarded on the issue of this year’s boxing scandal at the Paris Olympics, where Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan both swept to gold medals despite their sex tests having revealed the presence of XY chromosomes, the male pattern. While many in the sport danced around the row, saying it was all terribly complex, Warren is unambiguous. “From what I’m told, Khelif is XY. So, Khelif should fight men. It can’t be fair otherwise.”
Just as he is forthright on Khelif and Lin, two biologically male boxers with differences in sexual development, competing in the female category, Warren does not hold back on the separate transgender discussion, repeatedly asserting women’s right to their own sports and spaces. “It’s not right, women having to fight against opponents who are physically stronger because they’re male. It’s not what sport should be about. You don’t hear about a woman becoming a man and then suddenly wanting to fight men, do you?”
Pressed on the cowardice of many sporting governing bodies to take a stand – in particular the International Olympic Committee, who so dismally took charge of boxing – he says, flatly: “It’s wokeism. I guess I’m an old guy now. Look at it another way. Do I want my 10-year-old granddaughter going to Wembley and having to use the same bathrooms as men who are out on the beer? No I don’t.”
This same sentiment informs his view on the Tavistock Centre, the London trans clinic that closed in January after an independent review found it was “not safe” for children. “They should all be arrested,” Warren says. “They should be charged for what they’ve done to those kids, for the harm they’ve caused. And all because a boy wants to play with a doll. Do me a favour.”
He is just as withering on the segment of the Olympic opening ceremony that appeared to evoke Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper painting with drag queens. “I thought what they did there was dreadful,” he says. “It was disgusting. I’m not a religious person, but you show respect. And all they did with Christianity was to show total disrespect. I don’t understand all these drag queens being on TV in any case. There’s nothing wrong with pantomime dames, but you turn it on now and it’s like watching Danny La Rue on speed.”
Warren is perhaps most memorable of all in his takedown of the cult of self-ID. “I tell you what, if one of my kids started identifying as a cat, I’d put them outside with a saucer of milk. I’m serious. You wonder about the parents who allow this.”
The lunch has just rolled over its fourth hour. A meeting that was designed to explore the ethics of Saudi Arabia’s involvement in boxing has expanded into a far wider attempt to put the rest of the world to rights. Then again, Warren is nothing if not irrepressible. He has lived a quite astonishing life, with even his experiences with aviation capable of filling a book. “I was on Concorde in 2000 when part of the wing fell off,” he recalls. “Plus I was booked on the Pan-Am that was bombed over Lockerbie. I only missed it because I had gone to meet a Citibank executive in the West End.”
This is to say nothing of the night in 1989 when, promoting a bout in Barking, he stepped out of his Bentley and a masked gunman fired a .22 bullet at him from a Luger pistol. Warren lost half a lung and part of his ribs, but none of his resolve to reinforce his position at the summit of boxing. Indeed, if you take a step back, his tie-up with the Saudis represents just one chapter of a career that keeps confounding. 
After my “unfortunate” Wembley episode, we shake hands and finally make our separate ways, Warren disappearing in a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes. I cannot help conclude, after a frankly extraordinary lunch, that there is nobody quite like him.