Profile: the Just Eat takeaway tycoon turned UK cost-of-living tsar

theguardian.com:

Moments after he was announced as the government’s new “cost of living business tsar”, David Buttress, the multimillionaire co-founder and former chief executive of takeaway app company Just Eat, went out into his garden and inspected one of his chickens’ bottom.

“Long busy day with some great meetings,” Buttress tweeted on Monday night. “But always great to get home to the real world and ‘dad the chicken isn’t well can you go and check it’s [sic] bum’… keeping it real.”

Buttress, who has been tasked by the government with helping companies come up with “practical and real cost-of-living saving initiatives”, reported back to his 8,000 followers that in his “‘expert’ medical opinion” all was well with the chicken.

The chicken’s exact movements are unknown, but Buttress got straight to work on Tuesday, meeting the education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, supermarket bosses and sports organisations to hammer out ideas for how to help hard-pressed families cope through the summer holidays, when children will not be able to get free school meals.

Steve Barclay, the Cabinet Office minister to whom Buttress will report, said the takeaway tycoon would bring a “wealth of experience” and “the vigour and ingenuity of business to go even further in efforts to support British families throughout this difficult time”.

The appointment of the takeaway millionaire, whose former company has been criticised for helping fuel an obesity epidemic, comes just days after the government’s long-awaited food strategy was criticised by leading experts. Tim Lang, emeritus professor of food policy at City, University of London and a former commissioner on the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission, said: “There are no commitments, no targets, and