The abusive email that exposes how a Cameron crony acted as a bully boy for chums at tax-dodging tech giant Uber
GUY ADAMS continues his explosive investigation . . .
Few things are more terrifying to mild-mannered civil servants than an angry dressing-down from a member of the Prime Minister’s closest staff.
Falling out with No 10 can ruin careers or condemn entire departments of government to obscurity and irrelevance.
For a brief time 18 months ago, this was the chilling prospect that faced Jamie O’Hara, Head of Government Relations at Transport for London (TfL).
The date was September 30, 2015, and he’d just sent a polite email to one of then Prime Minister David Cameron’s top aides requesting a ‘catchup’ at the Tory conference in Manchester.
Such meetings formed an important part of O’Hara’s job at the TfL quango, which oversees the capital’s road, rail and Underground networks. It involved liaising with whitehall over a wide range of issues — from funding major infrastructure projects to placing road-signs.
This time, he hoped to brief the senior Downing Street adviser — Daniel Korski, who he’d met at the previous year’s Tory conference in Birmingham — about how a new ‘ticketless’ payment system recently introduced on the Tube ‘could be replicated elsewhere in the UK’.
So far so anodyne. Or so you might think. But four minutes after sending his email, O’Hara received a response of extraordinary hostility. Short in length and aggressive, it radiated petulance and menace.
‘To be honest,’ read the message from Korski, ‘as TfL does the kind of insane and luddite things you’re consulting on for private hire vehicles I can’t really see much point in discussing innovation and technology with you.’
The email ended abruptly, without so much as a ‘thank you’ or ‘best wishes’.
Judging by the tone, Downing Street — where Korski was deputy head of Cameron’s policy unit — was angered by something TfL had done. Specifically, I can reveal that the ‘ insane and luddite things’ Korski was complaining about were proposals by O’Hara’s then boss Boris Johnson, who was London Mayor, that had upset a tax- dodging internet company called Uber. Based in California, but funnelling most of its UK earnings to the tax haven of Bermuda, via Holland, the Silicon Valley firm runs a mobile phone app that allows users to hail minicabs at the touch of a button.
Launched in 2012, it quickly grabbed a big share of the taxi market. Yet Uber soon began to generate serious controversy in the process.
Some accused it of using predatory pricing (it loses around $2 billion a year) to undercut traditional black cab and minicab firms, to drive them out of business and create a monopoly.
Others noted that Uber had roughly doubled the total number of taxis in Central London, creating some of the worst congestion ever, and causing serious pollution. There were further concerns about passenger safety, with allegations of rapes and sexual assaults by Uber drivers reported at a rate of one every 11 days.
with all this in mind, Mayor Johnson had in September 2015 (days before Korski’s caustic email was sent) announced that TfL was considering 25 measures that might protect the public more and regulate better the private hire industry.
They included capping the number of taxi licences, making drivers pass an english test (many of Uber’s workers are foreign-born) and requiring cabs to wait at least five minutes between accepting a booking and picking up a client (Uber likes to fulfil such requests in just three). Naturally, the plans outraged Uber, which launched a petition against them.
Then, almost immediately, its campaign attracted some remarkable, heavyweight support.
For in a most unusual — and certainly controversial — move details of which were recently revealed by the Mail, both Prime Minister Cameron and his thenChancellor George Osborne began lobbying London’s Mayor to drop the proposed regulations affecting the Silicon Valley giant.
each sent furious (and some say threatening) text messages to Johnson, in which he was urged not to take steps that might damage the U.S. firm’s interests.
Then Korski, a renowned back- stairs operator regarded then as one of Downing Street’s most effective fixers, began attempting to persuade the Mayor to drop the proposed regulations.
Seven emails previously released under Freedom of Information [FOI] show Korski held several tense meetings with Johnson and his aides during the subsequent months.
An eighth email (the terse ‘insane and luddite’ message to O’Hara, which the Mail obtained this week) is more revealing still: for it lays bare, in writing, the extraordinary level of hostility the then No 10 man sometimes brought to the table. Korski is also said to have browbeaten senior City Hall officials in phone calls.
Unlike the emails now dribbling out, there is no formal record of them. But friends of Isabel Dedring, deputy mayor in charge of transport, have said the conversations were ‘abrasive’ and she said she was ‘ taken back by the aggression’.
Other strands of a wider lobbying campaign soon saw both the then Business Secretary, Sajid Javid, and the Competition and Markets Authority (the regulator protect- ing the public from unfair monopolies) come out publicly against the crackdown on Uber.
Perhaps inevitably, this campaign, which largely took place behind closed doors, ended in success: in January 2016, Johnson announced that — hey presto! — he was dropping all of the measures Uber had opposed. The firm’s market value duly soared.
Fast forward 14 months, and in March this year, the Mail first revealed details of this rum business. Our reports have since sent shockwaves through westminster — for two principal reasons. One is straightforward: Uber pays almost no tax in the UK, directly employs fewer than 100 people here and pays its drivers (who it claims are independent contractors) so poorly that many are on tax credits, at great expense to taxpayers.
So it seems a highly unsuitable candidate for vigorous support from the highest echelon of Britain’s government. Not least since transport policy in London is officially devolved to the Mayor.
The other reason the growing Uber scandal is so toxic is more murky. For one of the firm’s most senior executives at the time of
‘It’s a gross betrayal of black cab drivers and the travelling public’
the secret lobbying was Rachel Whetstone. She is one of both Cameron and Osborne’s closest friends, godmother of the former PM’s late son Ivan, and wife of Steve Hilton, his one-time policy guru.
In other words, the secret intervention by Downing Street leaves Cameron and Osborne open to accusations of cronyism: using their office and staff to secure valuable special favours for a member of their so- called ‘chumocracy’.
Adding to the ugly smell surrounding this is an apparent cover-up. For last year, Downing Street formally denied it has any record of Korski sending emails to TfL or anyone in the mayor’s office any time in 2015 or 2016.
The claim was made in response to FOI requests from Lib Dems on the London Assembly. But, separate requests to TfL have since revealed the existence of large numbers of such messages (includ- ing the abusive one to TfL’s Jamie O’Hara) that were sent during the period in question. Most discussed the regulation of Uber.
The Information Commissioner is therefore investigating whether Downing Street breached disclosure laws in an attempt to keep Korski’s emails secret. In theory, such behaviour may represent a criminal offence. The Cabinet Office denies wrongdoing, but has yet to explain what went on.
Meanwhile, there is mounting controversy over the fact that one of Uber’s major investors (and therefore a beneficiary of the Downing Street lobbying) is U.S. firm BlackRock. It recently hired George Osborne as an adviser, paying him a salary of £650,000 to work 48 days per year.
Little wonder that senior figures in the Labour Party, along with Lib Dem leader Tim Farron, have called for a parliamentary inquiry after the Mail’s revelations, along with wider connections between Uber and the Cameron machine.
I have been investigating this murky affair for several weeks, and the more that emerges, the more I am convinced it is one of the great political scandals of our time.
The saga shows how a rapacious, tax- dodging Silicon Valley firm was able to use highly paid lobbyists and well- connected senior executives to gain special treatment at the hands of the British government.
In a troubling perversion of democracy, a cabal of Downing Street insiders helped the offshore private company protect its valuable business model. Many were personal friends with the firm’s then £1million-a-year boss Whetstone.
Korski was not a social chum of the Uber boss. But his petulant email to O’Hara, which was released to the Mail under FOI this week, nonetheless raises yet more serious concerns.
For it betrays the aggressive (and some might argue downright sinister) manner Downing Street sought to exert its will.
In addition to spreading insults, Korski’s email after all suggested that TfL faced serious wider consequences should it persist with the planned regulation.
‘This new email makes it crystal clear, in black and white, the extent to which No 10 under David Cameron was prepared to throw its weight around,’ says Labour’s Wes Streeting, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Taxis.
He says it’s obvious Korski and No 10 ‘had TfL over a barrel, and were indicating that they would be unwilling to engage with them over a wide number of issues relating to transport in London unless they dropped proposals to regulate Uber. It’s an abuse of power and a gross betrayal of black cab drivers and the travelling public’.
Korski, however, says he engaged in an email exchange because he had a ‘remit to advise government on how best the UK economy could benefit from emerging new business and business models’.
His actions were designed to help the tech industry in general, not Uber specifically, he insists.
‘I did not and have not ever lobbied on behalf of any particular business while working in government,’ he said. ‘Any allegation that I did so is false.’
Korski — who now works for his own firm which helps companies to win government contracts and public sector deals — says he bore no responsibility for Downing Street’s FOI responses, and said any suggestion to the contrary is ‘fake news’. Yet the story refuses to go away. Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson recently submitted Parliamentary questions asking if Cameron and Osborne lobbied Boris Johnson on behalf of Uber.
With regard to Cameron, the Cabinet Office refused to answer, claiming it would be ‘ disproportionately’ expensive to do so.
However, the Treasury took a different view. It has now formally confirmed that Osborne ‘ had discussions with the former Mayor’ about ‘ London taxis and private hire vehicles’.
To which Watson responds: ‘When it comes to Uber, government ministers have turned obfuscation into an art form and shown contempt for the principle of open government.’
He wants Theresa May’s government to reveal the truth about any secret talks Cameron’s team had with Uber and whether it was given favoured treatment.
On the subject of special treatment, the Mail has separately established that, in recent years, Uber has hired three top lobbying firms with very close links to Cameron’s Downing Street machine.
In early 2014, Uber became a client of Westbourne Communications, a firm run by James Bethell, a former Tory candidate and exnight club boss once described by London’s Evening Standard as ‘an established Notting Hill friend of the Cameron set’.
The same year, Uber added Burson Marsteller to the payroll. It employed Andrew Mackay, Cameron’s former Commons aide, and Clarence Mitchell, who was director of the Conservative Party’s media monitoring unit in 2010.
The following year, Uber signed Portland Communications.
Its staff include James O’Shaughnessy, Cameron’s former director of policy who was made a life peer in 2015.
Although there’s no suggestion any of these men personally lobbied the PM on behalf of Uber, we know that someone at Westbourne spoke directly to senior government figures on behalf of the U.S. firm in 2015.
What’s more, ministerial diaries show that — in 2015 and 2016 alone — Uber’s staff held at least eight face-to-face meetings with Tory ministers. Among them were George Osborne, with whom they discussed ‘developments in technology’, Cameron ally and Skills Minister Nick Boles, with whom they talked ‘ consumer rights’, Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin (the topic: ‘London taxis’) and Business Secretary Sajid Javid (‘regulation of taxi industry’).
The vast majority of these chummy encounters took place after Cameron confidante Rachel Whetstone had joined Uber in May 2015. In her previous job, at Google, she helped the internet giant enjoy similarly intimate relations with the Cameron set.
London’s traditional black cabbies got short shrift, aside from a meeting with Javid in December 2015 and one with Korski the following month.
During that encounter, in No 10, Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association trade union, complained that his members were being bankrupted thanks to Uber which Downing Street had so vigorously supported.
‘Korski made no attempt to disguise his support for Uber, and that he had played a key role in thwarting the Mayor’s efforts to regulate it,’ recalls McNamara.
‘The only nice thing about the meeting was the tea and biscuits. The rest of the time, he was aggressive, opinionated and shameless in his defence of this firm and its exploitative business model. I left with the impression that he couldn’t care less about the plight of black cabbies.’
Maybe not. But in the chummy world of Cameron’s Downing Street, McNamara would have been naive to expect anything better. For unlike the Silicon Valley firm, he and his hard-working members didn’t boast enough friends in high places.
‘Aggressive, opinionated and shameless’ ’Ministers have shown contempt for government’