Are Cameron’s business blinkers down to greed or gullibility?

The former prime minister’s fondness for taking ‘high-risk, high-reward’ jobs has, once again, ended in controversy. Gordon Rayner and Ben Wright ask why he finds it so difficult to avoid trouble

For almost every prime minister, the number one item on their agenda when they leave office is the small matter of earning as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. Doing so without the help of unsavoury characters is not difficult: a seven-figure deal for your memoirs, the same again for public speaking and a comfy chair on the board of one of the big City firms should cover it.

Theresa May, John Major and Gordon Brown have all managed quietly to get on with the business of cashing in without attracting huge controversy. All three, for example, are signed up to the same public speaking agency in Washington DC, where fees for a single speech can run to six figures. Not bad for less than a day’s work.

Why, then, has David Cameron proved so incapable of avoiding trouble since he left politics in 2016?

Already the subject of a Cabinet Office investigation into his alleged lobbying on behalf of the collapsed financial firm Greensill Capital, yesterday Cameron resigned as chairman of the advisory board to Bermuda-based software firm Afiniti after its founder was accused of sexually and physically assaulting an employee.

The question Cameron must surely be asking himself is whether he could have seen any of this coming, or whether he is just unlucky.

According to those who know him – and his controversial former bosses – the answer is, at least partly, the former.

Chris Bryant, chairman of the parliamentary select committee on standards and privileges and a long-standing scrutineer of

Cameron’s outside interests, suggested the former prime minister “lacked a moral compass”, and even if that might seem overly harsh, few people could disagree that he has proved a poor judge of character in the past.

Bryant suggested Cameron had a habit of becoming “beholden” to people to whom he would be better advised to give a wide berth, like Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper empire.

Cameron came under fire during his premiership for his close friendship with Brooks, a fellow member of the so-called Chipping Norton set in Oxfordshire, after it emerged he had met her 22 times in six years – an average of once every three months – as well as texting her regularly. One text, telling her to “keep your head up” as the phone hacking scandal erupted, now seems spectacularly ill-advised, and points to Cameron’s tendency towards misplaced loyalty.

In another text, he thanked her for letting him ride one of her family’s horses, saying it was “fast, unpredictable and hard to control, but fun”. It could equally be a description of his employment strategy since leaving Downing Street.

His portfolio of jobs might best be described as high-risk, high-reward: on his official website, Cameron says he is working with businesses that are “all concentrating on innovative technology-driven sectors, including

Fin-tech, Medi-tech and AI”. The problem, however, is that Cameron knows little about what goes on under the bonnet of such firms, meaning he is exposing himself to more risks, in some cases, than he realises.

Cameron’s only commercial experience outside the world of Westminster was as the director of corporate affairs for television company Carlton, now part of ITV, when he was in his 20s. And yet, after leaving politics, he deliberately chose to work in sectors where companies notoriously make grandiose claims that are hard to refute without substantial technical expertise.

One former government adviser said: “He always had the reputation of being quite a lazy man, and he has spent his life being surrounded by a certain type of people, including fellow Old Etonians.

“It means that if someone offers him a lot of money for not doing an awful lot, he finds that very tempting, where other people might find it suspicious. His background means he is perhaps a little naive when he is confronted with more streetwise people.

“When he was in office, he also used to be impressed by straight-talking, no-nonsense types like Lynton Crosby [the Australian pollster]. He wasn’t used to people coming in and swearing and speaking plainly, because that wasn’t his background, but he liked it. People like Andy Coulson and Lex Greensill also fall into that category.”

Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World, was hired by Cameron as his communications director despite resigning from the newspaper over phone-hacking, and Cameron stayed loyal to him until he voluntarily resigned over media coverage of his own role in the scandal, which eventually led to his imprisonment. Greensill is the Australian financier given access to 11 government departments as an unpaid adviser to Cameron during his premiership. Cameron became an adviser to Greensill Capital in 2018 and arranged for Greensill to meet the then health secretary Matt Hancock.

He was, by all accounts, a superb salesman, but some in the City had already begun to question the financial underpinnings of the firm before its eventual collapse last year.

Greensill marketed itself as a fintech company that Lex Greensill claimed was “democratising finance”. In reality, it used fairly pedestrian technology – often bought from another company rather than developed in-house – to make loans to companies backed by unpaid invoices.

Friends of Cameron insist that he conducted “intense” due diligence on Greensill, consulting “respected figures in the fields of finance and technology” and that the company’s clients included blue chip companies like Ford, Nissan and Vodafone, which also failed to see problems ahead.

Cameron could not, it must be said, have predicted that Zia Chishti, founder of the software firm Afiniti, would be accused of sexually assaulting an employee, allegations that Chishti denies; other advisory board members included the likes of Admiral Michael Mullin, former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, and Mark Wilson, former chief executive of Aviva. Cameron resigned from the board because he spoke to Chishti after Spottiswoode’s testimony to Congress and “it soon became clear that he did not agree with the approach being taken by Mr Chishti in responding to the matter”, a spokesman for Cameron said.

However, choosing to accept a job with an AI start-up, rather than a more established business, carried with it a certain degree of risk. Brand new companies are, by nature, unknown quantities.

One public affairs specialist said: “Cameron was always a neophile, it’s in his DNA, and was part of the reason he was able to steer the Tory party in a different direction. His post-political career will partly be a function of the kind of people he hung out with and the connections he made while in office.”

Allies of Cameron point out that he also carries out unpaid work, as chairman of the patrons of the National Citizen Service and as president of Alzheimer’s Research UK, among other things. Political insiders say

Cameron was heavily influenced by the likes of Daniel Korski and Rachel Whetstone. Korski was the deputy head of the policy unit at 10 Downing Street, and has since founded Public, a venture that helps tech start-ups transform public services. Whetstone, who is married to Cameron’s former adviser Steve Hilton, advised Michael Howard before going on to work for Uber, Facebook, Google and now Netflix. Sir Nick Clegg, Cameron’s deputy prime minister in the coalition government, is now a high-ranking executive at Facebook.

One possible attraction of working for a potentially fast-growing company is that they tend to pay staff in options, which can end up multiplying in value many times if the company makes it big and ends up listing on a stock exchange or being bought by a rival. It has been widely reported that Cameron made about £7 million for two and a half years of part-time work at Greensill. However, he is likely to have made much more from the options he was awarded had the company not collapsed.

One former colleague of Cameron said: “Greed is definitely part of this. You look at Theresa May, who has made more than £700,000 since she left No 10, and for most people that would be a very tidy sum. But the kind of money Cameron is trying to make is in a different league.”

Sir Alistair Graham, former chairman of the independent committee on standards in public life (not to be confused with Bryant’s parliamentary committee), believes the recent eruption of “sleaze” allegations could lead to a toughening of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), which scrutinises ex-ministers’ jobs.

Acoba can currently only make recommendations to prime ministers, but Sir Alistair said: “Acoba should be put on a statutory basis and given more power, possibly enabling it to fine people and also monitor people. It could have helped Cameron out by stopping some of these appointments.

“Instead, everyone thinks they can just ignore Acoba or find a way round the system.”

Bryant said: “Former prime ministers get lots of support from the taxpayer – their office is publicly funded and they get police protection for life. In return for that, why not impose a 10-year restriction on what they can do?”

‘If someone offers a lot of money for not doing an awful lot, he finds that tempting’

‘The kind of money Cameron is trying to make is in a different league [to May]’