Cameron crony joins firm Tories gave £400k

AS CONSERVATIVE Party chairman, Andrew Feldman remunerated the political strategist Jim Messina to the tune of nearly £400,000 for work on the 2015 election campaign.

Now it appears to be payback time. Lord Feldman has just been appointed as adviser to the Messina Group.

The eponymous firm was founded by Jim Messina after he led the Obama For America 2012 campaign. ‘The Messina Group advises organisations and political campaigns,’ its website boasts.

It does this by ‘being data-driven, digitally savvy and grassroots focused’. The hard sell worked on Feldman and his Conservative colleagues — as well as enlisting their services for their general election campaign, Messina received £276,000 from the Torydominated Stronger In campaign for its work on the EU referendum.

The multi-millionaire former Conservative Party chairman, who has been a close friend of the former Prime Minister, right, since they were tennis partners at Oxford University, has been finding his feet and filling his pockets after his inelegant exit from Downing Street.

He registered Andrew Feldman Associates Ltd at Companies House in July, just ten days after Cameron announced that he would be leaving Downing Street following the EU referendum.

Lord Feldman of Elstree, as he has been known since Cameron secured him a peerage in 2010, immediately channelled his earnings from new advisory roles onto the books of his new company. He does not need to declare how much he is paid in the parliamentary register, but the roles are likely to involve seven-figure sums. Another potentially high-paying role for Feldman is that of senior adviser at Macro Advisory Partners, a consultancy with ties to former government figures and one of Barack Obama’s top intelligence advisers. Former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers is chairman of the firm. Feldman, who persuaded Cameron to stand as the dark horse candidate for the Tory leadership in 2005, remains a director and shareholder of Jayroma, his family’s multi-national women’s clothing manufacturing business.