Mordaunt won’t get a Penny from this oligarch Tory donor
Our Westminster columnist who takes no prisoners
OLIGARCH and prominent Tory donor Alexander Temerko is ‘torn’ between backing Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss for Prime Minister, former Welsh Secretary Alun Cairns tells me after I spotted him casually strolling through Parliament with the businessman on Friday.
There’s one candidate, however, who Temerko definitely won’t be backing, and that’s Penny Mordaunt. He threw a telling tantrum in January when he called the Trade Minister an ‘absolutely uncontrollable woman’ and a ‘threat to national security’. The latter is a bit rich from a man who used to make arms for the Russian military and was a defence minister under Boris Yeltsin, before switching his allegiance to another integrity-challenged Boris (Johnson).
Mordaunt’s crime was to oppose a £1.2billion underwater cable project by Temerko’s company, Aquind. The Portsmouth North MP went on to suggest in the Commons that Tories should stop taking money from the oligarch after his unsavoury outburst, adding: ‘Bullies should not be tolerated.’
Cairns didn’t appear to get the message and said he invited the former exec of Russian oil giant
Yukos to the Commons last week to discuss Ukraine.
Temerko, now a Putin critic, and Aquind have given more than £1 million to the Tories – including Cairns. The donor has regularly featured in photos at fundraisers with prime ministers and their Cabinets. I recall one Cabinet Minister, who had taken the Temerko rouble, telling me he wants nothing in return, just friendly dining companions. Which, logically, explains the oligarch’s anger over Mordaunt’s opposition to his business plans.
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O WHO then will Penny take a penny from? She used Friday’s leadership debate to highlight having spoken out against ‘some of the ways we [Conservatives] are funded’. Yet despite repeatedly asking her team to expand on what Mordaunt meant – will she overhaul the Tory donor gravy train, for example – sadly, reply came there none. However, I hear that at least one Leader’s Group member (£50,000 annual donation needed to qualify) is keen on having a flutter on PM4PM.
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ID Rishi Sunak give the game away during a leadership hustings? Asked what was his biggest weakness, Sunak actually said it was being too much of a perfectionist. ‘You’ve got to make sure that you don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,’ he explained. Keen Westminster watchers will know this is a favourite phrase of the very man Sunak is keen to distance himself from: one Michael Gove.
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HILE Lord (Bernard) HoganHowe waits to see if kissing the ring of Boris Johnson gets him the job of running the National Crime Agency, the disastrous former Met commissioner has taken his 18th paid gig – just in case.
Hogan-Howe (not to investigate) was in charge of the bungled VIP child abuse Operation Midland and separately failed to discover why the Met ‘mass-shredded’ police corruption files. Just the man with the right natural intelligence to become a business development adviser to Mind Foundry, an Oxford-based artificial intelligence firm managing government data. T
OM Tugendhat’s promised ‘clean start’ involves bringing Daniel Korski into his leadership bid. He’s the former senior aide to David Cameron who was embroiled in the Uber lobbying campaign exposed by this newspaper well before the data dump repackaged by The Guardian this week. Korski led secret talks between Ministers and then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who assuaged Uber’s fears of losing its licence to operate in the capital.
Korski went on to found a tech fund focusing on public sector work and was given a seat on Government boards by Matt Hancock at the Department of Health and by Liz Truss at the Department for International Trade. What a clean start.
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EANWHILE, Truss has brought Jason Stein on to her team. He was a Tory adviser during the Theresa May era who in 2019 left to spearhead embattled Prince Andrew’s ‘fightback’ over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. That went well.