Cameron: a “too cosy” relationship?
Lobbying is the “big scandal waiting to happen”. So David Cameron warned in 2010, as he promised to “clean up” British politics, and put an end to the “too cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money”. And yet a decade on, said Guy Adams in the Daily Mail, the former PM is himself embroiled in a lobbying scandal. For we now know that in 2018, Cameron quietly accepted a job as an “adviser” at a firm called Greensill Capital, and was given shares in it. At one point, these were worth $70m. But in capitalism, there are winners and losers – and by last year, the firm was on the verge of bankruptcy; so Cameron started lobbying his contacts in government, in a failed effort to secure it millions in Covid loans. He even sent text messages to the Chancellor. His behaviour did not breach the anti-sleaze rules he introduced as PM, as they apply to third-party lobbying groups and he was an employee; but he was surely guilty of “staggering hypocrisy”.
Why on earth did Cameron take the job? Some say he was motivated by money, said Oliver Wright in The Times – a desire to keep up with his rich circle; others that he was merely bored. His wife was busy with her fashion business; he was earning a fortune on the speaking circuit, but he’d not found a meaningful role for himself – and was too lazy to create one, like Tony Blair did. But the real question is how he got the job. It turns out that he’d first met Greensill’s founder, Lex Greensill, back in 2012, when the young Australian financier was invited to Downing Street by the late Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, to examine ways of using supply chain finance to fast-track payments to government suppliers. Heywood, who’d worked with Greensill at Morgan Stanley, loved the idea, and soon the Australian was pitching it all over Whitehall; but other civil servants objected: if suppliers were being paid too slowly, they asked, why not just pay them faster? Why get third-party bankers involved? Yet Cameron signed off on a scheme involving payments to NHS-linked pharmacists, which Greensill’s company ended up running.
Alas, the saga does not end there, said The Independent. Greensill collapsed last month, putting thousands of jobs at risk at the firms it financed, including Liberty Steel. Now, Boris Johnson is being urged to launch an inquiry into how Greensill was granted privileged access at Whitehall. To ensure the Conservatives are above suspicion, he should heed those calls – and plug the holes in the lobbying laws that allowed Cameron to get off on a technicality.