Sleaze? It’s just the Tories being themselves
WOULD you have responded to Sir James Dyson as the pandemic hit Britain, promising to fix his tax concerns if he would build life-saving ventilators for the NHS? I daresay I would. Who cares about box-ticking during a pandemic?
That’s the difficulty with Labour’s condemnation of the Prime
Minister’s private text exchanges with Dyson, considered in isolation. It seems petty. Whether the PM persuaded the businessman via text message to start developing the machines, or whether his officials did it in formal meetings, will strike most people as irrelevant provided there was no profiteering involved and no tax deals that wouldn’t have happened anyway. (In the event, Dyson’s firm actually lost £20m.)
No one got hurt and if this were a one-off incident relating to a politician of unimpeachable character that would probably be the end of it.
But it’s Boris Johnson we’re dealing with here and this is no isolated incident. It’s not the leaked exchange itself that matters so much as what it says about who has access to senior ministers, up to and including Mr Johnson – and who does not.
This is the latest in a series of revelations about a government enmeshed with wealthy private interests, a relationship that isn’t properly monitored and which ministers can’t be trusted to be transparent about.
In other words, it’s the old-fashioned Tories being themselves – not a party of the common man and woman, as Mr Johnson likes to make out, but the party of the bosses. The leopard hasn’t changed its spots.
James Dyson, a billionaire Brexit supporting businessman, had Mr Johnson’s personal mobile number. What a surprise. So who else has a private hotline to the First Lord of the Treasury and can use it to circumvent the normal channels, during or outside of a crisis?
Another person to lobby the Prime Minister personally is apparently Mohammad bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince, who the US believes approved the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He reportedly sent a message to Mr Johnson last summer urging him to intervene to push the Premier League to “correct” its decision not to allow a £300m buyout of Newcastle United. The PM referred the matter to his special envoy for the Gulf.
So which other individuals contact our wonderfully available Prime Minister directly? Does he take late night calls from the chief executives of anti-poverty organisations? How many teachers’ leaders does he share memes with? What about social work chiefs or refugee campaigners?
Of course I could be wrong, but my guess is that they don’t make it past middle-ranking civil servants.
If you want a direct line to ministers, it helps to be the right sort of person and have the right sort of connections. Former Prime Ministers can help. Their contacts books are worth tens of millions, if the rumours are true about David Cameron’s promised windfall if Greensill Capital had been floated. Lex Greensill, the Australian entrepreneur who was given his own desk in Downing Street during the Cameron years, subsequently employed the former Prime Minister as a lobbyist. David Cameron went on to text Rishi Sunak on behalf of Greensill, about changes the finance company wanted to Covid-related loans, securing multiple meetings for Greensill with top Treasury officials. In 2019, he also arranged drinks for Greensill with the health secretary, Matt Hancock.
All very cosy, and it doesn’t stop there. Senior civil servant Bill Crothers started serving as an adviser to the now-collapsed firm while still working for the government. In Whitehall, it must be hard to know at times where the private sector ends and the public sector begins.
The Greensill affairs rumbles on, with inquiries ongoing, but if anyone doubted the value of personal connections, they need only read the National Audit Office’s report on the UK government’s procurement of PPE. Firms bidding for PPE contracts with links to politicians or senior officials went through an unusual “high priority” lane and were 10 times more likely to win contracts than those who did not. Understandable to go with known individuals during a pandemic, perhaps, but it may help explain how Tory donors were among those to receive contracts.
The word sleaze has been used, prompting counter-claims that no one has broken the rules. But the rules are nowhere near robust enough – lobbyists must register if they are consultants but not if they are in-house. Ministers must register meetings, but text messages and Whatsapp exchanges are exempt. Barmy. It allows for an unhealthily close relationship between money and government.
For the system to work at all, ministers must have an acute sense of propriety and effectively police themselves. Can we trust Boris Johnson to do that?
I’ll give you a moment to pick yourself up off the floor and then let’s consider the evidence. We all know that he is an opportunist, not known for his high-minded ethics (fired from The Times for fabricating quotes, lying about the £350m a week to be spent on the NHS if Britain left the EU: you know the back story).
Last month, businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri admitted she had had a four-year affair with the thenlondon mayor, while he was still married. The Independent Office for Police Conduct said Mr Johnson would have been wise to declare the relationship as a conflict of interest. Mr Johnson? He claims he acted with honesty and integrity.
Oh gimme a break. As others have said, it all leaves an unpleasant tang in the air, the tang of decaying standards.
So if we can’t be sure politicians will act appropriately, then what? Until now, the focus of lobbying regulation has been lobbyists. But it’s the lobbied we should be more closely policing. Of course organisations are going to seek favours from government, but it’s whether those interactions are dealt with transparently and properly that matters. We need to close the loopholes around lobbying and have a stricter code of conduct for politicians. They need to discourage contact via text and other mobile platforms and they need to treat organisations that approach them personally or via a friend in the same way they treat those who come through official channels.
This isn’t about using the right colour of form. It’s about restricting an iniquitous culture where money and personal connections talk.
It all leaves an unpleasant tang in the air, the tang of decaying standards