IMAGINE, for a moment, you had some spare cash to hand. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, £250,000. Now, if you were a business, what would you do with that money? You could, and this is always a popular choice, give yourself a bonus. You could possibly even award your staff a pay rise (less likely, I know, but the option is there). You could even reinvest it in your organisation.
Or maybe, just maybe, you could donate it to the Tory party in return for face-to-face updates on government thinking from both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Now, obviously, you could get some idea of the prevailing political landscape from listening to the news or reading white papers or checking out what’s happening in parliament. That wouldn’t cost you a quarter of a million quid. But, I guess, that doesn’t quite have the personal touch, does it?
Anyway, when you are then having your little chat with Boris and Rishi, you wouldn’t even think of offering some suggestions about where they might be going wrong, or where they could possibly help your own particular business out. Of course you wouldn’t. Who’d even think such a thing?
No one, according to the Transport Secretary Grant Shapps on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday when questioned on these cash-for-access meetings as reported in the Financial Times.
As Shapps, who some people might remember as “multimillion-dollar web marketer” Michael Green in his pre-parliamentary days (though Shapps himself denied he was Michael for years), told Nick Robinson:
“When you fundraise people should understand it doesn’t give you any say over anything that goes on in government, but you are, of course, very welcome to hear about our policies and what we plan to do.”
To which the only answer is surely, “Yeah, right mate.”
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Meanwhile, health minister Lord Bethell whose overseeing of the awarding of Covid contracts is currently the subject of a legal challenge, has – you might say conveniently if you were the suspicious type – replaced his mobile phone before it could be searched for any information relevant to the deals in question.
Lord Bethell, who last year told everyone on Twitter that his success was all down to his ability to “hustle”, and therefore presumably nothing at all to do with the fact that he was an old Harrovian peer – is also under investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office over the use of private emails for government business.
It is perfectly possible, of course, that there is nothing to see here. Just as it is perfectly possible that down the line if we ever have an inquiry into the government’s actions during the pandemic, we will learn that the awarding of contracts to neighbours and friends and relatives of Cabinet ministers and advisors, as well as the odd former Tory councillor was all above board and nothing to be concerned about.
Or maybe, just maybe, it will turn out that all of this is exactly what it looks like. That we are currently being ruled by a bunch of spivs.
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