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In the wake of the 2009 spending scandal, in which MPs were found to have filed claims for, among other things, a £ 1,600 floating duck house and a £ 2,200 bill to clean a moat, then-Conservative leader David Cameron warned that political lobbying would be “the next big scandal waiting to happen.”
Cameron took it upon himself to reshape “the overly welcoming relationship between politics, government, business and money,” which he said had “tainted our politics for too long.”
More than a decade later, the former prime minister finds himself embroiled in what could turn out to be exactly the kind of lobbying scandal he once sought to stamp out. It involves the collapse of a $ 7bn (£ 5bn) bank, text message lobbying by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a camping trip to the desert with the Saudi prince accused of ordering the brutal murder of a journalist.
When he resigned as Prime Minister and Conservative MP shortly after losing the 2016 Brexit referendum, Cameron vowed he would not become a political “distraction.”
He said he would be too busy writing his memoirs in his two £ 25,000 shepherd’s cottages at holiday homes in the Cotswolds and Cornwall.
His book, For The Record, was not a hit with critics. It sold just 65,000 in its first year, well below the 350,000 sales of Tony Blair’s book A Journey and less than the 91,500 copies of John Major’s autobiography, according to figures compiled by Nielsen Book Research.
He also made a short public speech at the rate of £ 120,000 an hour at the Washington Speakers Bureau.
It’s not such a bad hourly rate, but Blair has been paid up to $ 500,000 (£ 365,000) for a 20-minute speech.
His company, the Office of David Cameron Limited, made a profit of £ 836,000 in 2019, the most recent year available from Companies House. But sources close to Cameron have suggested that he may feel his post-political career has not been as successful as that of his Cabinet colleagues.
George Osborne, who was Cameron’s Chancellor, has served as editor of the Evening Standard and is now a partner in an investment banking firm where the two previous partners have shared £ 207 million in payment over the past six years.
Nick Clegg, Cameron’s Liberal Democratic Deputy Prime Minister, is now Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and says he earns a “seven-figure salary.”
There was a period, shortly after actor Danny Dyer described Cameron as an “idiot” who had escaped to Europe “with his feet up” in 2018, in which Cameron was said to have told his friends that he was “bored as shit” and that he was considering a return to politics, according to The Sun.
Now it has emerged that Cameron took a different direction, signing up as a lobbyist for controversial billionaire banker Lex Greensill, whose eponymous bank collapsed in administration in early March. The demise of Greensill Capital has thrown other companies into crisis, including Liberty Steel, which employs 5,000 people in the UK.
Cameron reportedly told friends that he was given stock options worth up to 1% of the company. Last year, Greensill expected to be listed on the stock market at a valuation of $ 7 billion, which would have valued a 1% stake at $ 70 million (£ 51 million).
While working hard to secure his potential windfall, Cameron failed to declare his work for the bank on the official Register of Consulting Lobbyists, a watchdog designed to increase transparency in the murky world of lobbying and featured under his own prime minister position.
Cameron’s work for Greensill has included lobbying the chancellor and, according to the Financial Times, going camping in the desert with Lex Greensill and Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince who according to US authorities had approved the 2018 assassination in 2018. Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey.
Greensill is said to have boasted that Cameron helped him bond with Mohammed bin Salman. The trip to Saudi Arabia came shortly after Cameron sparked public outcry with another visit to the kingdom for the October 2019 “Davos in the Desert” summit.
The trip came just days after SoftBank, the mutual fund managed by Japan’s richest man, Masayoshi Son, announced that it was investing another $ 655 million in Greensill. Softbank’s Vision Fund was one of Greensill’s largest investors, having invested around $ 1.5 billion before the crash. The largest investor in Vision Fund is the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia.
Cameron is said to have repeatedly sent text messages to Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s private phone asking him to give Greensill special access to millions of pounds of emergency loans from Covid during the height of the coronavirus crisis in March last year.
He also held 10 virtual meetings between March and June 2020 with the second permanent secretary of the Treasury and other senior officials, as recorded in transparency records. Soon after, Greensill was accredited as a lender under the coronavirus big business interruption loan scheme.
Cameron did not respond to requests for comment and has not spoken publicly about his work for Greensill.
The Registry of Consulting Lobbyists investigated Cameron’s lobbying on Sunak, but found that the former prime minister did not violate the rules as they only apply to outside lobbyists and not internal lobbyists. “Based on the detailed information and guarantees provided, Mr. Cameron’s activities do not meet the criteria that require registration in the Registry of Consultant Lobbyists,” said the watchdog.
Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, insisted that Cameron had done “absolutely nothing wrong” in his work for Greensill. Speaking on Sky News on Tuesday, Kwarteng said that now that Cameron had been cleared of breaking lobbying rules, people should “move on.”
