Another week, another sewage outflow of corruption into the polluted river of Tory politics. Are voters so profoundly cynical that no political bribery or MPs touting for contracts shocks them? Polling suggests the country is not losing its sense of smell.
The time may soon be here to take up John Major’s call in the Guardian to clean up party funding and stop dirty donations from distorting democracy. For that, the public has to swallow what it deplores: state funding for political parties. Every inquiry has concluded there is no alternative.
Here’s the latest filth: the Tories direct their biggest donors to apply for public posts controlled by a Downing Street unit hidden from public scrutiny. The Sunday Times reports “officials offering behind-the-scenes support and directing applicants to a secretive Number 10 unit”. That’s their win-win: collecting cash for the party while trying to pack Tories into appointments to public and arts bodies.
This comes on top of openDemocracy revealing that donors giving £3m or more to the Tories are virtually guaranteed to be offered a peerage. The stink surrounding Tory fundraising leaks out in an email from its treasurer’s office telling their big donors: “We thought you may be interested in the latest list of public appointments. It is important Conservatives rebalance the representation at the head of these important public bodies.” The party’s donor club the Leaders’ Group charges a minimum of £50,000 a year for access to ministers.
The Tory party co-chairman, Ben Elliot, the Duchess of Cornwall’s nephew, is founder of Quintessentially, a luxury concierge service offering “lifestyle management” for the ultra-wealthy. It boasts it can do anything: they once told me of delivering bongo drums to the bored teenage son of a billionaire on a yacht mid-Pacific; and paying a top Manchester United footballer to play with a plutocrat’s seven-year-old. That’s the world Elliot fishes in while he also guides donors to public appointments.
The Times reports that Elliot told senior advisers at No 10 that one major donor would be an “excellent candidate” to oversee emergency Covid-19 loans. His staff lobbied for Mohamed Amersi, the telecoms millionaire and £750,000 Tory donor, to chair the National Lottery Community Fund; he made it to the last round of selection. This week Elliot’s fundraising comes under scrutiny when Amersi takes his feud with the Tory party to the high court in a libel claim against former Tory MP Charlotte Leslie for questioning the origins of his wealth.
In all this murk, no one knows a donor’s true influence, but sometimes they break to the surface. Jonathan Leavesley, the chair of the secretive Midlands Industrial Council bankrolling the Tories and the Taxpayers’ Alliance, threatens their cash in the Daily Telegraph: “I have been a party donor through bad times as well as good, but my enthusiasm can ebb and flow.” Castigating the rise in national insurance contributions and corporation tax, Leavesley writes: “Have they never heard of the Laffer curve? It is time for the government to act as a free enterprise champion and act Conservative. Get a grip Boris, or go.”
Other donors are on the rampage over Johnson’s failings, but it’s not for them to ordain his fate. Colossal power is wielded by dangerously few donors, says Brunel University’s Prof Justin Fisher, with just 10 people donating a quarter of Tory funds – more than £10m – since Johnson became prime minister. Particularly pernicious is Johnson’s elections bill abolishing the Electoral Commission’s power to prosecute illegal donations.
Labour was always over-reliant on power-wielding union leaders. Unite’s leader, Sharon Graham, last week rattled her money bags in a crude threat over a dispute with bin lorry drivers in Labour-run Coventry. “Let me be very clear – the remaining financial support of the Labour party is now under review,” she said.
Keir Starmer would have none of it: “The Labour party I lead is not going to be influenced by threats from anybody, whoever they are, and that is just an absolute matter of principle.” Fisher points to the 2019 general election, when Unite donated £4.6m of Labour’s £8.3m; the union has already cut funding after Jeremy Corbyn’s departure. This politicking ignores union members’ interests, since Labour’s strongest policies include fair pay deals in every sector, ending zero hours insecurity and guaranteeing every workplace access to union recruiters. Unlike secret Tory influencers, at least Unite’s attempt at cash-for-influence is rudely transparent.
John Major rose to a tremendous philippic against Boris Johnson’s corruptions, though as prime minister he was no Cicero. As ever with former prime ministers, you sigh at their retrospective wisdom, regretting radical reforms they never dared, such as party funding. “The system needs cleansing,” he writes, to stop politics being “the plaything of the rich or of pressure groups”. Limit donations by individuals and unions so donors no longer “sway policy through an open cheque book”.
The last review in 2011, by the Committee on Standards in Public Life, called for capped donations, with state funding at 50p a year per voter. But Nick Clegg slaughtered it at birth in the Commons, saying austerity spending couldn’t afford it. Deep public mistrust means politicians fear asking taxpayers to foot the bill, though political parties are essential to a functioning democracy: less than 2% of the electorate ever join a party. The best idea for distributing state cash came from the Power Inquiry, chaired by Helena Kennedy: voters at elections should allocate a £3 state voucher to any party. That too was killed stone dead.
Plummeting polls show the limit to how much voters “priced in” corruption with Johnson. Enough is enough, the country hasn’t run out of outrage. Whoever inherits Johnson’s filthy stables can only make a clean break by purging political funding.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
