Two of Britain’s biggest high street banks are embroiled in a £2.5bn takeover battle for Evelyn Partners, the wealth management group.

Sky News has learnt that Barclays and NatWest Group were among the bidders notified last week that they were through to the second round of the Evelyn auction.

Royal Bank of Canada is also said to be in the frame to buy Evelyn, while a number of private equity firms have also tabled offers for the business.

Lloyds Banking Group is understood to have explored an offer for Evelyn, although it was unclear on Tuesday whether it remained interested.

For Barclays and NatWest, an acquisition of Evelyn would bolster an area of their businesses where both already have a strong presence – the latter through its Coutts division.

Paul Thwaite, NatWest’s chief executive, has been clear that the bank will consider acquisitions where they are sensibly priced and strategically attractive following its return this year to full private sector ownership.

According to results published in August, Evelyn had assets under management of £64.6bn at the end of June, reflecting growing demand across the wealth management sector.

Canaccord Genuity’s wealth arm is also on the block and could fetch a price of over £1bn.

Evelyn is owned by the private equity firms Permira and Warburg Pincus, having merged their respective firms Tilney and Smith & Williamson in 2020.

Last year, Evelyn’s professional services arm was sold to the buyout firm Apax Partners.

The current auction is being handled by bankers at Evercore.

Barclays and NatWest declined to comment.

A millionaires’ playground, Poole in Dorset boasts some of the most expensive properties in the UK, and has been called Britain’s Palm Beach.

Away from the yachts and the mansions of Sandbanks, however, Poole is also a beer drinkers’ paradise, with 58 pubs in the parliamentary constituency alone.

But now many of Dorset’s pub landlords have joined a bitter backlash against rises in business rates of up to £30,000 in Rachel Reeves’s November budget.

Across the UK, it is claimed up to 1,000 publicans have even banned Labour MPs from their pubs, after the chancellor axed a 40% rates discount, introduced during COVID, from next April.

The row over the rises, brewing since the budget, came to a head in a clash between Kemi Badenoch and Sir Keir Starmer in the final Prime Minister’s Questions of 2025.

“He gave his word that he would help pubs,” said the Tory leader.

“Yet they face a 15% rise in business rates because of his budget. Will he be honest and admit that his taxes are forcing pubs to close?”

The PM replied that the temporary relief introduced during COVID – a scheme the Conservatives put in place and Labour supported, he said – had come to an end.

“But it was always a temporary scheme coming to an end,” he said.

“We have now put in place a £4bn transitional relief.”

But in the Barking Cat Ale House in Poole, facing an increase in business rates of nearly £9,000 a year, the father and son co-landlords fear the rises could mean last orders for many pubs.

“We’re sort of in the average area at 157%, but we’ve got a lot of local pubs that are increasing by 600%, and another one by 800%,” Ambrose senior, Mark, told Sky News.

“It’s a pub destroyer. Pubs can’t survive these kinds of increases. It’s not viable. Most pubs are just about scraping by anyway. If you add these massive increases your profit margins are wiped out.

“We struggle as it is. You can’t have that kind of increase and expect businesses to succeed.

“Fortunately, the customers understand. But they still don’t want to have to spend an extra 30 or 50 pence a pint.”

Son Michael added: “It’s all back to front. It’s really these bigger pub companies and supermarkets that need to be facing increased taxes. We can’t handle them. They can.”

Michelle Smith, landlady of the Poole Arms, the oldest pub on the town’s quay, dating back to 1635, said: “Our rates per value is due to go up £9,000 in April, so it’s quite a deal.”

“And we had a rates increase just gone as well,” she added. “So our rates had already increased over £1,000 a month last April. So another hit is quite considerable really.

“Prices definitely have to go up with all the different price increases that we’ve got throughout: business rates, wage increases, the beer goes up from the breweries. Everything is going up.”

Backing the publicans, Neil Duncan-Jordan, who became Poole’s first ever Labour MP last year, has written to the chancellor demanding a rethink. He said he is prepared to vote against the tax rise in the Commons.

“They’ve got to listen,” he told Sky News.

“They’ve got to listen to the high street, to publicans, people who run social clubs and listen to problems that they’re facing and the impact that these changes have made.”

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Pint price rises to come unless govt make changes

Mr Duncan-Jordan said he was prepared to support an amendment to the Finance Bill, which turns the budget into law and had its second reading in the Commons last week.

Despite being suspended for four months for rebelling against welfare cuts earlier this year, he said: “I was discussing this with some MPs just this morning and I’ll be happy to support those. Sometimes you just have to say what you think is right.”

As chancellor, Ms Reeves has regularly raised a glass to pubs and promised to protect them from rising costs.

But Sir Keir has faced the wrath of a publican before, when he was thrown out of a pub in Bath during COVID by an anti-lockdown landlord.

This time, without a U-turn by the chancellor on the business rates increases, pub landlords fear the government has them over a barrel.

Informa, the FTSE-100 events group behind the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show and World of Concrete, is kicking off a search for its next chairman.

Sky News has learnt that Informa, which has a market capitalisation of about £11.3bn, is working with headhunters to find a successor to John Rishton.

City sources said on Monday that Russell Reynolds Associates was handling the search.

A former chief executive of Rolls Royce Group, Mr Rishton joined the Informa board in September 2016 before taking over as chairman nearly five years later.

People close to the process said he was likely to step down in 2027, by which time he will have served for nearly 11 years as a director.

Informa has a large data division, which has been responsible for a significant proportion of its recent growth.

Its assets previously included the historic maritime news and analysis service Lloyd’s List, which claims to be the world’s longest published business newspaper.

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Reeves’s spring budget date is revealed

Earlier this year, it emerged that Lord Carter, the company’s chief executive, had moved his residency to Dubai to reflect its rapid growth prospects in the Gulf region.

The launch of a hunt for a new chairman and Lord Carter’s recent relocation makes it increasingly likely that he will extend his current 12-year tenure by at least another two years.

Shares in Informa, which declined to comment on the search for Mr Rishton’s successor, closed on Monday at 885.2p.