Uber and Cameron’s No 10 chumocracy
IT is one of the murkiest episodes in the Cameron years. Just why did Downing Street bend over backwards to help Uber, a tax-dodging US minicab app company notorious for exploiting drivers, causing congestion and undercutting highly trained and regulated London cabbies?
As an inquiry is launched into No 10’s failure to disclose crucial emails, this paper hopes light will be thrown on the workings of the chumocracy at the heart of the former prime minister’s administration.
Indeed, the Mail has led the way in exposing how Downing Street leaned on Boris Johnson, then London Mayor, to drop his plans for regulating Uber.
As we revealed, aides bombarded him and his staff with angry phone calls and messages (mysteriously said to be missing), while David Cameron and George Osborne are said personally to have sent him texts, instructing him to lay off the US firm.
This is despite cab regulation in the capital being devolved to the Mayor and having nothing to do with central government.
So we ask again: why were the PM and his chancellor so keen to intervene on behalf of a Californian company that pays an effective tax rate of just 1 per cent in the UK?
Isn’t it hard to avoid the conclusion that they were influenced by their very close friendship with Rachel Whetstone – who stood down yesterday, for unexplained reasons, as Uber’s communications chief? Godmother to Mr Cameron’s late son Ivan and married to his former strategy director, Miss Whetstone previously worked for that other tax- dodging American giant Google, whose ‘ revolving door’ access to No 10 was said to have helped secure favours.
Arousing further suspicions, shortly before Mr Johnson abandoned his plan to regulate Uber she hosted the Camerons and Osbornes at an intimate Christmas party at a Mayfair restaurant, Sexy Fish.
Meanwhile, Mr Osborne has landed a £650,000, one-day-a-week job at America’s BlackRock – which happens to own a £500million stake in Uber. How can this be right, so soon after he used his influence as chancellor on the firm’s behalf?
The Information Commissioner’s inquiry into those missing emails can be only the first step towards establishing the truth about ministerial favours for friends.
It should surely be followed by a full parliamentary probe into an unedifying affair that smells more offensive by the day.