Just when I was starting to warm to my old university dope-smoking compadre David Cameron he gets himself involved in a scandal which reflects very badly both on his personal judgement and on declining standards generally among our disgraceful political class.
The former Conservative Prime Minister has been caught lobbying for a very dodgy-sounding financial firm called Greensill Capital. He sent texts to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak urging him to fork out millions of taxpayers’ money to bail out the ailing company under cover of the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
According to the Sun:
He is also said to have been in contact with other Government ministers as well after going to work for the firm after leaving No10.
Critics have demanded an investigation into the ex-PM and how he was able to lobby ministers without it being recorded internally.
This doesn’t look good. Especially when you appreciate the stupendous sums of money he allegedly stood to make if the deal went through (which happily for the taxpayer it didn’t).
Reports say Cameron told friends he was set to make as much as £60million from the share options he owned in the company.
In my representations to government, I was breaking no codes of conduct and no government rules.
Also, apparently, he was doing it all for the good of the country.
I thought it was right for me to make representations on behalf of a company involved in financing a large number of UK firms. This was at a time of crisis for the UK economy, where everyone was looking for efficient ways to get money to businesses.
It may well be true that technically Cameron broke no rules. But that doesn’t exactly let him off the hook, especially to the charge of outrageous hypocrisy.
Here, before he became Prime Minister, was what Cameron said on lobbying in a 2010 speech at the University of East London. (It now appears to have vanished from the Conservative’s website).
It is the next big scandal waiting to happen. It’s an issue that crosses party lines and has tainted our politics for too long, an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money.
I’m talking about lobbying – and we all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisors for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way. In this party, we believe in competition, not cronyism. We believe in market economics, not crony capitalism. So we must be the party that sorts all this out.
Well, that speech didn’t age well, did it?
Cameron went on:
It arouses people’s worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works, with money buying power, power fishing for money and a cosy club at the top making decisions in their own interest.
Yes. And that’s exactly the problem isn’t it? We may be tempted to look back on Cameron’s premiership as a relatively golden era. (Not that I’m suggesting that it was any good. Merely that he enjoyed the huge advantage — indeed this was probably his greatest achievement — of not being either Theresa May or Boris Johnson). But what’s clear from this grubby affair is that the system was rotten to the core even back then.
How come, for example, that in 2012 Lex Greensill, the Australian financier at the heart of this scandal, was given his own email address and phone line at 10 Downing Street? His role was to act as an unpaid ‘supply chain finance advisor’ to the government.
This was at the instigation of Cameron’s powerful Cabinet Secretary, Jeremy Heywood who (it was often said) was the real power behind both the Cameron administration and the subsequent Theresa May administration.
Since when was it the business of the Civil Service to be handing out special privileges to private-sector cronies? Where was the oversight here?
And how come another senior Civil Service mandarin Bill Crothers was simultaneously working part-time as advisor for Greensill while keeping his main job deciding who would be the beneficiaries of lucrative public contracts? How can this blatant potential conflict of interest have been permitted?
According to iNews:
As the Government’s chief commercial officer on a salary of £149,000, Bill Crothers oversaw the expenditure of roughly £40 billion of public money. And between September and November 2015 he was also allowed to advise Greensill part-time while on the public payroll.
Mr Crothers went on to be a director of the company, which filed for administration last month, and is at the centre of an investigation into its connections within Government following the disclosure that the former Prime Minister David Cameron lobbied Chancellor Rishi Sunak on its behalf.
Mandarins like the late Jeremy Heywood make a very big deal out of the notion that Britain’s Civil Service is the envy of the world for its incorruptibility. But this all sounds like cronyism to me: special favours being handed out at taxpayers’ expense to those politicians, civil servants and vulture capitalists who’ve wormed their way into the system and expect to benefit from it, no questions asked.
The reason up until this point I had been warming to Dave Cameron was that I thought: “Well at least he hasn’t gone and done a Tony Blair.” Blair, as we know, has been making like a bandit since leaving office and meddling in national and international affairs (where, of course, he is always and without fail on the wrong side of the argument) as though he were somehow a respected and respectable figure rather than a satanic globalist on the make.
Cameron, on those rare occasions when he did make the papers, came across like someone of whom you could be rather fond: snapped looking a bit overweight in his Vilebrequin swimming shorts, buying a ridiculously expensive caravan for his garden.
Now, though, he has confirmed that all that high-minded talk about fighting corruption when he was Prime Minister was just eyewash. He’s as bad as all the rest of them: they’re all on the make, they don’t give a damn about the little people like you and me because politics has given up all pretence on being about public service. It’s just about grabbing what you can when you can. No wonder the country is in such a mess.
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