The Conservative party chair, Richard Holden, has four times refused to say whether the party continues to take millions from its biggest donor, Frank Hester, after it was revealed the businessman had made comments condemned as racist and misogynistic.
Holden said he could not comment on whether the Tories had recently accepted £5m, after it emerged that Hester told colleagues in 2019 that looking at Diane Abbott made you “want to hate all black women” and said she “should be shot”.
Hester gave £10m to the party last year, making him its biggest funder in the run-up to the next election.
Asked on the BBC’s Politics Live whether a further £5m had been donated, Holden repeatedly refused to say but added that he was “comfortable about accepting money when people have been clear about their views”.
He said: “Mr Hester apologised fully for his comments at the time and I think if people have apologised then we should accept that, when they’ve clearly made a major contrition. I can’t comment on individual donations. It would be inappropriate.”
Pressed further, he said: “All I would say is anything would be declared in due course. Any donations we get will be declared in due course.”
Party sources have previously told the Guardian that an extra £5m had been received and that the party planned to keep all of Hester’s £15m, but this has not been publicly confirmed.
After the interview, Anneliese Dodds, the chair of the Labour party, wrote to Holden asking him to give the public the transparency they deserved over whether the Tories had received a further £5m from Hester.
She wrote: “When questioned you avoided answering, and stated that donations would be published in the usual way. This means that we will have to wait until June – when the Electoral Commission next reports – to know whether your party accepted another donation from Frank Hester, and how much the donation was worth.
“Your refusal to be clear about this can mean only one of two things: either as Conservative chairman you are unaware of what’s going on in your own party; or you are content to continue accepting money from Mr Hester but don’t have the courage to say so.
“Whatever the reality, the British public deserve to know the truth. Will you therefore confirm if the Conservative party has accepted or plans to accept further donations from Mr Hester: yes or no?”
The controversy over Hester’s donations broke out in March after the Guardian reported on this 2019 comments. Hester said in a 2019 meeting at his IT healthcare firm that he did not hate all black women, but seeing Abbott, who is Britain’s longest-serving black MP, on TV meant “you just want to hate all black women because she’s there”.
After the report, Abbott made a complaint to the Metropolitan police. The West Yorkshire force has taken on the inquiry into the remarks, as they were made at Hester’s company offices in Horsforth. A police spokesperson said officers were “working to establish the facts and to ultimately ascertain whether a crime has been committed”.
After the publication of the remarks, a statement from Hester’s company, The Phoenix Partnership (TPP), said he “accepts that he was rude about Diane Abbott in a private meeting several years ago but his criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin”. The statement said Hester abhorred racism, “not least because he experienced it as the child of Irish immigrants in the 1970s”.
The statement added: “He rang Diane Abbott twice today to try to apologise directly for the hurt he has caused her, and is deeply sorry for his remarks. He wishes to make it clear that he regards racism as a poison which has no place in public life.”
TPP, a healthcare technology firm, has been paid more than £400m by the NHS and other government bodies since 2016, primarily to look after 60m UK medical records. Hester has profited from £135m of contracts with the Department of Health and Social Care in less than four years.
Hester gave £5m to the Conservatives in May 2023 and announced last month a further £5m donation, which had been accepted by the party from his company in November last year.
