Brexiteers hold him up as a paragon of British engineering and entrepreneurship. But he took an already-solved problem and "re-imagined" it with twice the cost and power requirement.
Don't know about Vax but my 17-year old Dyson performs just as efficiently as when I bought it. I notice that most of the new cleaners in the market in my region appear to copy Dyson's cyclonic separation idea - because it works!
And then shipped production off to Malaysia and Singapore.