“We’re going to make absolutely sure that ex-ministers are not allowed to use the contacts and knowledge gained in government for their own private gain,” declared David Cameron in a campaign speech just before becoming prime minister a decade ago.
So “absolutely sure” that he is now in the dock of public opinion for… using the contacts and knowledge gained at the very top of the government for, amongst any other objects, his own private gain. And not small gain, but reportedly for potential riches worth many millions, which he hoped to make from promoting a company set up by a banker who worked for him in No 10.
Day by day a veritable directory is emerging in light of Cameron’s meetings, drinks, phone calls, texts and emails lobbying high officials and ministers in No 10, the Treasury and across Whitehall for the interests of financier Lex Greensill.
As in all human affairs, what happened was essentially simple, and in large part down to greed. Greensill worked for Cameron with a view to milking government, then Cameron worked for Greensill in the (albeit ultimately disappointed) hope of milking government. In both cases, the system should have stopped it, but in both cases it failed.
To add a bit more colour, Greensill, who had worked for Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, got himself into Cameron’s No 10 and promoted financial products which he claimed would help the NHS and the public sector. Then he set up a company to commercialise these products. Then he sought to make this company Very Big and Global, flying around the world in four private jets, buying a bank in Germany, hiring an array of other former top public officials and lending vast sums to international tycoons, scheming for the British taxpayer to pick up a large part of the tab by means of emergency Covid-19 finance. But he gambled too far and the edifice collapsed last month, and is now engulfed in legal and ethical scandals straight out of Anthony Trollope’s gripping novel The Way We Live Now (1875), about a Victorian version of Greensill, Augustus Melmotte.
The rules in Whitehall now need radical reform so this kind of thing can’t happen again. And not just to prevent a repeat of Greensill, but what looks to be the equally serious scandal of billions in “VIP contracts” to provide PPE and other services to the NHS during the pandemic, awarded to or presided over by Tory party donors and friends and relations of ministers and top officials, without open competition. This is the sort of thing Britain used to lecture its former colonies and the developing world on how to eradicate. Now it is a case of: “physician, heal thyself.”
Of course there have been allegations of sleaze in the past, and under governments of all stripes. So is this really worse than what has gone before? In some respects, yes. When I became a minister in 2005, I was told I should not own any shares in any company with which the government might contract. I divested myself of all shares in companies. Now, the Health Secretary actually owns a stake in a company run by his sister which is receiving NHS contracts.
But there has always been too much complacency about ethical standards in the British state. From a House of Lords largely composed of rich tycoons, hereditary landowners and party donors, to a corporate and civil service elite drawn largely from the wealthy scions of a handful of elite private schools, to a governing Conservative Party which does the same for the political elite, Britain’s rich and entitled have always milked the system to pass their private gains from generation to generation.
And yet because we have fairly free and open elections and a fairly free and diverse media, every now and then a scandal becomes just too great and Something has to be Done. I think we are reaching one of those points.
