Tories will never cut ties with their cable guy...
ALTHOUGH Tory chiefs have distanced themselves from party donor Maurizio Bragagni after he made a wild outburst against ‘foreign Muslims’, he remains a Government adviser.
It is, of course, the Italian-born British citizen’s talent – and not his £600,000 donations – that got him exclusive access to the heart of Westminster.
In March, for example, the owner of a cable manufacturing company visited Parliament on a busy day, took tea with the Commons Speaker and had an audience with the Prime Minister. Boris Johnson’s taxpayerfunded photographer captured the scene, but the special moment was not made public by No10 on its official Flickr account.
Bragagni’s political schmoozing is intimately connected to his role as consul of the Republic of San Marino – a city state and tax haven within Italy – that has proved attractive to top Tories. Theresa May went on a £7,611 freebie there to accept an ‘Order of Saint Agatha: Grand Cross’ from Bragagni. Jeremy Hunt accepted the same bauble – along with unrelated donations from the businessman. No doubt Hunt, as he jockeys to succeed Mr Johnson, will soon be condemning Bragagni’s disgraceful anti-Muslim musing that immigration has reduced London to a city ‘worse than any African metropolis’.
And what about that other wannabe PM, Liz Truss, who ‘handpicked’ the donor to join a trade advisory group? Will she react as quickly as she did last week when pushing Helena Morrissey out of her Foreign Office role for criticising the PM? Last night, the Department for International Trade told me ‘we do not condone’ Bragagni’s comments – but refused to sack him as an adviser.
Following the furore over Bragagni’s comments on an Italian website, he apologised that the English translation ‘caused unnecessary controversy’. That’s Tory donorspeak for ‘Sorry, not sorry’.
As for Andrew Rosindell, the Tory MP who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on San Marino, he was unusually nowhere to be found in Parliament.