The growing smell over Uber and the malign power of Cameron’s chumocracy

EvEN David Cameron’s fiercest critics can’t deny his real achievements as prime minister. His government halved the deficit inherited from New Labour from £150 billion a year to approximately £70 billion today (though it could and should have done better).

And it worked hard to push through important reforms to Britain’s out-of-control welfare state and education system. Mr Cameron also deserves praise for bringing some grace back to Downing Street after the thuggish New Labour years.

But the former occupant of Number 10 had one significant flaw. Like Tony Blair before him, he governed through a cabal of close friends. Mr Cameron’s ‘chumocracy’ replaced the Blair ‘sofa government’.

And in the past few days we have been discovering the shocking extent of its malign influence. The growing scandal over the American internet minicab company Uber, uncovered in an exemplary investigation by the Mail’s Guy Adams, is symptomatic of the gross weakness at the heart of Cameron’s administration.

This is a story dating back to late 2015 and Cameron’s last year in Downing Street before he resigned following Britain’s decision to leave the EU.

Threatening

The then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was determined to protect the capital’s highly regulated black cab drivers by applying tough regulations to Uber, a company whose current £ 56 billion market capitalisation is built on enabling customers to access cut- price minicabs, within minutes, using mobile phone technology.

Following the launch of Uber in the capital in 2012, there were fears its ultra-cheap fares were putting traditional cabbies out of business.

As we now know, Mr Johnson was promptly cut off at the knees by Downing Street after he was bombarded by a series of threatening emails from senior officials in No. 10 — and lobbied personally by the Prime Minister and his chancellor George Osborne.

Meetings were set up for the Mayor with Cabinet ministers and Downing Street officials, who made it clear that Uber’s business interests were not to be curtailed.

Shamefully, Boris Johnson gave in to this pressure rather than stand up for London cabbies (and, by extension, taxi firms elsewhere in Britain, whose livelihoods are also threatened by Uber as it spreads all over the country).

People like Kollie Badis, a cab driver of my acquaintance who came to Britain in the Nineties to escape the Algerian civil war. He invested his life savings in acquiring ‘ the knowledge’ — the qualification all black cab drivers must have to ply their trade.

For more than a decade, Badis, 50, earned enough to make a good life for his wife and five children in their home in Hounslow, near Heathrow Airport. Not any more. His living has been cut from under him since Uber arrived.

There is a giant mystery at the heart of all this. Why on earth did Cameron decide to wage war on exactly the type of self- employed, tax-paying, small businessmen and women who are the backbone of the British economy?

Why did he join battle on behalf of a monolithic, grasping international corporation with no roots in Britain, where it pays an effective rate of 1 per cent tax? This, remember, is also a firm that does not pay vAT here, though it is facing a legal challenge on the issue.

The Mail yesterday provided one important clue. In the runup to the EU referendum last year, Uber agreed to message its users — the vast majority of them young and likely to be pro-EU — urging them to register to vote.

So Uber appears to have done a political favour for David Cameron, shortly after the prime minister had helped it out commercially. But that can’t be the only reason.

Black cab drivers have long been one of the symbols of British national identity, like Marmite, the monarchy and red telephone boxes. If they represent tradition, then Uber symbolises the kind of trendy internet venture that seems to utterly bewitch Cameron.

Yes, Uber drivers are cheaper — no wonder. They have no training and are entirely reliant on a sat nav. Some of them barely speak English.

Crucially, they are much less regulated. Indeed, according to the police, an Uber driver is accused of rape or assault in London once every 11 days.

So what was Downing Street up to?

Thrall

The answer casts a depressing light on the relationship between business and politics in modern Britain — and on a prime minister who was too often in thrall to others in his social circle, or dazzled by the very rich and famous.

Given what we now know about how Cameron helped Uber, it seems unlikely to be a coincidence that the firm’s senior vice president of policy and communications is his friend and former colleague, Rachel Whetstone, godmother to his late son Ivan.

Ms Whetstone is married to Cameron’s former chief strategist at No. 10, Steve Hilton: she is one of the best- connected operators in Britain. Around the time of her appointment to the taxi firm, George Osborne met with Uber twice, and business minister Matthew Hancock once.

And how fascinating that BlackRock, the largest world’s largest asset management business, holds a £500 million stake in Uber.

BlackRock’s connections with the Cameron Tories are, of course, second to none. After the 2015 election, Rupert Harrison, George Osborne’s gifted special adviser in Downing Street, joined BlackRock as a senior adviser.

Notoriously, George Osborne has since joined, too — on an annual salary of £650,000 for working one day a week.

The full facts have yet to emerge, but this strange saga is smelling worse by the day. Nor is Uber an isolated example of the way the upper echelons of the Cameron government conducted themselves.

For instance, Mr Cameron appointed his old university friend and tennis partner, Andrew Feldman, as Tory Party chairman, a decision which has left the party in desperate straits.

Like Cameron, Lord Feldman cultivated very rich men. (As the Mail reported yesterday, he has just taken a job with the Messina Group, a political consultancy run by a man he paid £400,000 to work on the Tories’ 2015 election campaign.) As a result, the direction of the Conservatives fell into the hands of Tory donors rather than ordinary members, whose numbers withered on the vine under the public school clique that ran the party.

The culmination of the Cameron approach to government came with his resignation honours list, in which obscure ‘yes’ men and women were rewarded with honours they frankly did not deserve.

One such beneficiary — he got a CBE! — was Daniel Korski, the Downing Street aide tasked with ensuring that Uber was protected.

Ugly

All this goes a long way to explain why the British people — including plenty of black cab drivers — voted for Brexit last year. They felt that we were governed by a political class intent on looking after their own interests.

It is for this reason we need to know the full truth about how Uber used its Downing Street connections.

So far, officials have done their best to protect Cameron by refusing to release documents which would cast light on any alleged lobbying by, or on behalf of, Uber.

That is unwise — not least because Transport for London has released details of the relevant correspondence it holds, which suggests No.10 officials were implicated.

Theresa May ignores this scandal at her peril, otherwise she risks being drawn into it, too. The nation must learn the full truth about this ugly story of how money and power conspired to compromise government, and wreck the livelihoods of many ordinary Britons.