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Is the UKs democracy for sale, asked the Financial Times. Reporters from this newspaper have revealed the existence of a select coterie of financiers and grandees who belong to an invitation-only club known as the Advisory Board and who enjoy frequent, direct access to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.

The price of membership? Big donations to the Conservative Party, some as high as 250,000. What they discuss with ministers is not minuted. The very existence of the board is not documented. It exists in a shadowy world of privileged access.

Orchestrating it all is the Tory party co-chairman Ben Elliot, the founder of Quintessentially, a concierge service that caters to the super-rich: it secures restaurant reservations and society invitations; it advises on the best schools; it has even sourced albino peacocks for a Jennifer Lopez party.

Thats fine in business; but allowing wealth to facilitate access should not happen in government. Property developers, for instance, have paid 18m into Tory coffers since 2019. With major planning reforms in the works, thats a clear conflict of interest.

Elliot is certainly well connected, said Robert Mendick in The Daily Telegraph: colleagues call him Mr Access All Areas. Hes the nephew of the Duchess of Cornwall and, by marriage, the Prince of Wales. It recently emerged that he arranged for a telecoms multimillionaire and philanthropist called Mohamed Amersi a Quintessentially client to have dinner with Prince Charles at Dumfries House in Scotland in 2013. Amersi later donated 1.2m to Prince Charless charities, and has given 750,000 to the Tory party.

Amersis meeting with Charles has caused a minorfurore, said Sean OGrady in The Independent. But should we really care if social-climbing plutocrats meet the heir to the throne? Yes, they might try to arrange favours in return for donating to the Princes charities. But theyd be disappointed: Prince Charles has no real power and very little influence.

Come to that, theres nothing wrong with donating to a political party, said Daniel Hannan on Conservative Home or with being a property developer. We know about these donations because they were duly registered with the Electoral Commission. Theres nothing furtive or sinister about them.

I disagree, said Sean ONeill in The Times. Amersi used the euphemism access capitalism to describe how his wealth opened doors, allowing him to wine and dine with the Prime Minister. This case came soon after a report describing how the disgraced financier Lex Greensill had enjoyed extraordinarily privileged access to David Camerons government. And we have heard how friends and associates of MPs were able to wangle lucrative PPE contracts.

If this was happening in Iraq, Zimbabwe or Venezuela, wed call it what it is: corruption. The easy access to power granted to those with the fattest wallets is having a corrosive effect on trust in government and public life.

Read more from the original source:
Cronyism and the Conservatives: is the UKs democracy for sale? - The Week UK