TORIES STILL SILENT ON BILLIONAIRE PALS
TORY chiefs have refused to reveal billionaire members of their elite donor dining club – more than a year after they promised they would.
Donors who give £50,000 or more can join the Conservative Party’s “Leader’s Group”, allowing them in to private dinners with Boris Johnson and Cabinet ministers.
But attendees at the dinners have not been published since 2018 and the Conservatives have since quietly scrubbed all past records from their website.
In June 2020, Tory chiefs said they were “committed” to publishing the register of Leader’s Group meals “in due course”.
Labour chair Anneliese Dodds has written to her Tory counterpart Amanda Milling demanding the lists are published urgently “for the sake of your own credibility”. She told our sister paper the Mirror: “It’s completely unacceptable that for three years now the Conservatives have refused to say where their funding is coming from.”
A Tory spokesman told the Mirror: “Donations to the Conservative Party are properly and transparently declared to the Electoral Commission and are published by them.”
Ex-PM David Cameron agreed to publish lists of the dinners in 2012 after undercover journalists met billionaire former Tory treasurer Peter Cruddas posing as donors.
After a libel battle over the story which he partially won, the Court of Appeal ruled Cruddas had “effectively” said the journalists “would have an opportunity to influence government policy” through confidential meetings with the PM.