Monday 9 August 2021
If the government is set on a policy (or policies) that will lead to a substantial increase in electricity demand, it is a matter of simple logic that the supply side is sorted out well in advance, to ensure that there are no costly grid failures.
But, in a further indication of the chaotic nature of the Johnson administration's policy-making, we find that a vital pillar of the future supply programme – the renewal of the nuclear fleet – is under still further stress.
This comes to us courtesy of the Telegraph which is reporting that the timeline for the French energy giant, EDF, to decide whether to go ahead with the £20 billion Sizewell C power station has slipped once again.
This is the site which, in October 2010, Cameron's administration announced was suitable for a new mega-plant, one of eight in the future nuclear programme devised to renew Britain's ageing nuclear fleet and to expand capacity to meet the UK's emission reduction commitments.
But a fateful decision to invite Chinese financial participation delayed initial development plans for five years, when Britain and China concluded Strategic Investment Agreements in October 2015.
Following that, serious reservations were aired about continued Chinese involvement in the EDF-led consortium, with the China General Nuclear (CGN) Group holding a one-fifth stake in the project. The Group is owned by the Chinese government and was blacklisted by the US in 2019 for alleged theft US technology for military use.
Since then, UK ministers have been seeking to exclude Chinese interests from the project, while funding negotiation continue on how to replace the missing funds. As of late July, these had yet to be resolved, leaving questions hanging as to whether the British government might take a direct stake in the project.
With that as background, EDF is now holding off making a final investment decision on the Suffolk plant, and will not make up its mind until the end of 2022 or even 2023. It had earlier been expected to make a decision in mid-2022.
This, however, is by no means the only potential for delay. A detailed planning application was only submitted to the planning inspectorate in May 2020, and anti-nuclear activists have been mounting a series of legal challenges in the hope of further delaying the project.
The Planning Inspectorate's decision is expected by the end of the year, with a government decision in early to mid-2022 – assuming that no additional legal challenges are mounted. And then there is the requirement for environmental permits from the Environment Agency.
The consortium has also submitted plans to build a temporary desalination facility alongside the site to provide fresh water during construction, involving up to nine 40ft shipping containers. Northumbrian Water, which owns local water supplier Essex & Suffolk Water, has said a new mains pipeline will be needed to bring in water from another catchment area, but is unlikely to be ready until at least 2026.
Alongside this, the consortium is applying for a nuclear site licence from the Office of Nuclear Regulation (ONR), which was submitted on 30 June 2020.
The ONR do not expect to reach a decision until at least the end of 2021, and the site licence is not in itself permission to start nuclear-related construction. That requires separate regulatory permission from ONR, a process which does not start until the license is granted.
This process is likely to be anything but straightforward. The designs for the two new, 1.6GW reactors are based on a similar unit in Flamanville, Manche, France on the Cotentin Peninsula. There, construction started on 4 December 2007 and power generation was expected to start in 2012.
However, as a result of a series technical faults and safety concerns have delayed the project. It is now unlikely that it will start producing power before the end of 2022. Meanwhile, the initial estimated cost has escalated from €3.3 billion to €19.1 billion for the single reactor.
This is only the latest in a line of problematical start-ups for the European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPWR) technology used by the Hinkley Point and Sizewell C plants. Another application has been in Taishan, Guangdong province, China, where the first of two units started operation in December 2018 and the second in September 2019, after construction work had started in August 2008. In July of this year, though, one of the reactors was closed down for maintenance after "minor damage" to fuel rods.
The shut-down was only authorised after EDF, which jointly manages the site, had warned the US government that China's nuclear regulator had raised limits on permissible levels of radiation outside the plant to avoid shutting it down. EDF later said a problem with fuel rods had led to the build-up of gases, which had to be released into the atmosphere.
The first application of the technology, however, was in Finland's Olkiluoto 3 reactor, built by French-German consortium Areva-Siemens. There, construction started in 2005, with expectations of operations starting in 2009 – almost laughably optimistic given what we know now.
In fact, due to safety concerns and faulty components, permission to load nuclear fuel was only given in March of this year, 16 years after work started. Costs had escalated from the initial fixed price of €3 billion to about €8.5 billion.
Another EPWR reactor was to be built at the site, with permission granted by the Finnish parliament in July 2010. But, given the experience with the current plant, the operators have decided not to apply for a construction license.
As to British experience, the Somerset-based Hinkley Point C plant, which was the first UK unit to use EPWR technology, was given the go-ahead by the British Government in January 2008. Cost is estimated to be in the order of £23 billion and operations are not expected to start until June 2026 – nine years later than originally forecast.
Thus, while Sizewell C is expected to take between nine and 12 years to build – according to the Telegraph - the track record of the EPWR construction programme would suggest otherwise. On current form, it is extremely unlikely to be in operation before 2035.
Given the inbuilt delays in the SMR programme, there is an extremely strong probability that the UK government can expect no production from nuclear power by the time the prohibition on diesel and petrol cars starts in 2030 – apart from Sizewell B, which will decommission in 2035.
Then there is also the ban on gas boilers in new homes, effective from 2025, with plans to install 2.5 million heat pumps in new homes by 2030, substantially adding to electricity demand as the need for supplementary electric heating rises.
All of this adds detail to yesterday's piece, illustrating that our electricity supply is perilously fragile. Without nuclear power to cover the base load, and increasing reliance on volatile wind power, there is a very great and real danger of a collapse of the system.
And how far that reliance on wind takes us, and how dangerous it is, I will tackle in another piece.
Also published on Turbulent Times.
Richard North
09/08/2021
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Sunday 8 August 2021
Amongst other things, this last week, I was working steadily for the Mail on Sunday on a piece about electric cars, commissioned in the wake of the comments by Johnson's climate spokesperson, Allegra Stratton (pictured) on preferring her "third hand" diesel Golf, citing the lack of range of current electric vehicles (EVs).
Writing for the Mail isn't as easy as it looks. The paper has its own house style, which is nothing like my own writing, and it needs facts to be presented in a certain way that keeps the attention of its readers.
To get it into shape took several drafts over three days, with the prompting and assistance of the features editor. His help shaped the article into something the paper could use, and it is now published in today's edition.
Taking Stratton's comments for my initial theme and then developing it gives the piece its title: "The problem isn't how far electric cars will travel... it's where the electricity will come from".
But I start by reminding readers that Johnson's administration has taken the "dramatic step" of banning the sale of new diesel and petrol cars from 2030. After that, motorists wanting new cars will have to turn to battery power, or other zero-emission technology – with a five-year hiatus on certain hybrids.
With that, I write, it is no wonder there was much consternation at Stratton's intervention, her rationale being that she visits elderly relatives living up to 250 miles away. She would not, she said, be able to do that without stopping to recharge.
On this point, though, she was not entirely right – as her critics were quick to point out. The performance of electric models is improving all the time and many have a range of more than 200 miles without recharging.
Stratton did, however, have a defender, Bjørn Lomborg, writing in the Telegraph. His view is that the emission savings - even if the whole world achieved all of its ambitious electric vehicle targets – would be minimal.
On this, he is not wrong, as I explore later in my own piece. But, as to the initial proposition, I assert that range is the least of the obstacles to a battery-powered future. The most serious is the simple fact that electric cars must be recharged from the mains.
This, I say – with due regard for Mail hyperbole - will vastly increase the amount of electricity Britain uses. And generating electricity will remain a dirty, inefficient, highly polluting business for decades to come.
This is where the green dream comes crashing to earth. A 2030 deadline is beyond a pipedream, it is complete fantasy. Britain's electricity supply is already very fragile and, without drastic improvement, we are on the verge of suffering power cuts.
The hope, of course, is that all these electric cars and vans would be powered by sources of renewable energy, such as wind or solar, or nuclear reactors. If that was the case, electric motoring would be largely emissions-free but, such is the state of the system that we are a long way from eliminating fossil fuels and are unlikely to do so for decades.
For sure, coal-powered generation has declined sharply since 1993, when it provided nearly half Britain's power, and it is true that much of the gap has been filled by renewables. But wind is an intermittent source of energy, and it doesn't take a genius to work out that solar panels produce no power when it is dark and little on cloudy days. Thus, I argue, wind and sun can never be the complete answer.
This, in fact, is an area I have been researching intensely, and I will need to publish a separate post to set out all the details. But, as it stands, while a record 43 percent of electricity generation came from renewables in 2020 (albeit in the context of unusually low demand thanks to Covid-19), more than 37 percent still derived from dirty fossil fuels, mostly from power stations using natural gas. On cold, still nights, that figure is likely to climb to 80 percent or more – particularly with more electric cars on the roads.
And here is the point which meshes with Bjørn Lomborg's views. By the time gas has been turned into electricity and has reached a car's electric motor via a leaky distribution network, the process is no more energy-efficient than Allegra Stratton's old diesel.
What tips the balance is the extra weight of the batteries. A typical EV carries 600 lb in batteries, the equivalent of two adult passengers. If all 32 million of Britain's cars really were battery-powered, they would be carrying an extra 8.5 million tons – the same as powering an extra five million vehicles. Thus, as long as we depend on gas – which indeed we must - electric cars will bring no overall saving in emissions.
The alternative of biomass fuel is even less efficient. The huge Drax power station in North Yorkshire imports wood pulp from Canada to burn, but it would be greener to drive on diesel than use electricity made this way.
One much talked about alternative is nuclear energy, but here, too, the future is no brighter. Britain's building programme for new nuclear reactors has stalled, with costs spiralling. The price of the plant being constructed at Hinkley Point in Somerset has increased from £16 billion to £23 billion, with no end in sight to rising costs and no proof the technology works.
A similar design, Sizewell C in Suffolk, would take between nine and 12 years to complete, with a starting price tag of £20 billion, if the project ever gets approval in the first place. Yet six of the UK's seven current nuclear reactors are planned to go offline by 2030 and the remaining one, Sizewell B, is due for decommissioning in 2035.
Here's the rub. Britain is already running out of electricity. There simply won't be enough to power Britain's fleet of 32 million cars by 2030, not even if we continue to burn fossil fuels. Moreover, we are increasingly dependent on imported electricity – from Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Ireland.
And while there are unlikely to be enough electric car charging points in time for the 2030 deadline, that is of less importance if there's no power flowing through them. There were fewer than 250,000 plug-in cars on the road last winter, yet our national electricity system came close to breaking down.
With the increasing reliance on renewables, a prolonged period of high pressure can stop wind turbines from turning and reduce the amount of energy generated by then to as little as two per cent of the total. Lights could start going out across the country if just one major power station suffers a mechanical failure or a shortage of fuel.
The thing here is that this problem is well known to our electricity planners, who thought they'd been given more time to solve it. In 2017, for instance, the National Grid was assuming that EV sales would only reach 90 percent of all cars by 2050. Now, with the nearer deadline to ban petrol cars, there is no chance of generating sufficient electricity for millions more battery-powered vehicles.
By 2050, for instance, they were relying on the widespread introduction of smart technology, which they anticipated could shave as much as 32 GW off projected peaks. They also expected, by then, that EVs would be more energy-efficient cars. But, with the shortened timescale or a mere nine years, neither is likely to materialise.
As a result, we hear talk of asking EV owners voluntarily to limit their recharging to off-peak periods. But, with inadequate access to charging points – especially outside London – drivers mostly have to charge their vehicles when they can. This will often be during daytime peaks, placing yet more strain on our creaky infrastructure.
In passing, I take a swipe at "green" battery production, noting that mining the ores required is a highly polluting business, and often uses child labour, before drawing to the conclusion that Ms Stratton is right to stick to her old Volkswagen.
But there is another sting in the tail. Perhaps she knows, I suggest, that batteries are particularly inefficient in cold weather, when the range is reduced. In extreme cold, range can be reduced by more than half, especially if drivers are rash enough to use heaters, windscreen wipers and lights.
Who, I ask, wants to be stuck at a freezing, windswept service station, waiting for a vacant charging point? Perhaps, therefore, Stratton also knows, privately, that the 2030 deadline is both unworkable and dangerous. This green revolution on the roads, I conclude, risks turning the lights out across Britain. And it isn't even green.
Also published on Turbulent Times.
Richard North
08/08/2021
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Saturday 7 August 2021
Not since the fall of Saigon in 1975 have we seen such an egregious and humiliating failure of US military power, shared in part by its coalition allies which must include the British as the largest partner contingent.
Although there was considerable civilian participation on the part of the coalition governments, it has to be said that the 20-year tenure of the US-led intervention has been primarily a military effort.
The US military expedition in late 2001, launched with the initial aim of dismantling the al-Qaeda presence in the country, morphed at the end of the year into the coalition effort under the UN-established International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Its task then was to take on and defeat the Taleban and to train the Afghan national security forces.
In August 2003, ISAF became nominally led by Nato but, while some of the US forces in the country reported to Nato, the majority remained under direct national command, in particular the massive air power deployed by the USAF, the US Navy and Marines.
With the withdrawal of US forces all but complete, and the Taleban operating freely in much of the country, few doubt that this has been a military failure, although I watched briefly General Richard Dannatt on BBC's Newsnight.
He denied that a Taleban victory was a "slam dunk". The Afghan national forces, he declared, were "well trained" and outnumbered the Taleban. He called for multinational support of the Afghan government and efforts to restart the Doha peace process.
The latest report on the ongoing talks, though, refers to a "deadlock", with the Taleban demanding "the lion's share of power" in any new government. There seems little chance, therefore, of immediate progress.
As for Dannatt's assertion that the Afghan forces are "well trained", no one who has stayed close to events in Afghanistan could possibly make that claim. One only has to read Ben Anderson's book, No Worse Enemy or watch some of his films to appreciate how hollow that claim really is.
Also, when we see reports of the ANA deserting wholesale to the Taleban, or seeking refuge when confronted by Taleban fighters – amid further reports of them surrendering vehicles and weapons – numerical superiority becomes a somewhat irrelevant matter.
Then Dannatt, who was CGS from 2006 to 2009 – and possibly the worst head of the Army we've had in living memory – has a history of living in cloud-cuckoo land, as I pointed out in my very last post on my now defunct blog, Defence of the Realm.
There, I reviewed a BBC programme aired on 26 October 2014 entitled "The Lion's Last Roar" but, before working through the BBC web page, I referred to my own work, written some years previously, on 17 August 2009:
… As we have watched the train wreck that masquerades as strategy in this benighted country, we have become more and more convinced that it is wrong – totally, completely, fundamentally wrong.
It cannot succeed. It will not succeed and the inevitable outcome is that, after the expenditure of much more of our treasure – which we can ill-afford – and the death of many more fine men (and, probably, some women), we will be forced into a humiliating retreat, dressed up as victory, leaving the country in no better a condition than when we found it – if not worse.
Bearing in mine the most recent events, it might be difficult to suggest that I was wholly wrong, even if in 2009 it was already obvious. Then we had the BBC telling us that: "Military leaders failed to calculate the magnitude of the conflict in Afghanistan", with Gen. Wall admitting they "got it wrong".
This man, for a time commanding ISAF forces, added: "We had put forward a plan saying that for the limited objectives that we had set ourselves, this was a reasonable force. And I freely admit now, that calculus was wrong".
He then told us: "We have a phrase in the Army, 'hope for the best but plan for the worst'. We were actually hoping for the best and planning for the best. I mean I didn't have the resources I needed. I didn't have a reserve, I didn't even have an aircraft to fly round my own patch. I mean we just weren't in the real world".
In a comment that has not lasted well, Wall went on to say that: "The lasting impact we will have had is not just to sanitise the threat to allow the development of governance and economy, but to be a witness to and stimulus for very significant social change, with an improving economy, with jobs, with much developed farming opportunities in contrast to narcotics". "Had we not done this", he said, "Helmand could well be looking rather like the borders of Syria and Iraq".
Also on the programme was Dannatt, then as always seemingly more interested in covering his own back. Having completely misread the tactical position in both Iraq – where he thought the military effort could be scaled down at the height of the insurgency – and in Afghanistan, where he thought he could Hoover up the Taliban with fast-moving squads of men in eight-wheeler mine-trap APCs – back in 2014, he told us:
Looking back we probably should have realised, maybe I should realised, that the circumstances in Iraq were such that the assumption that we would get down to just 1,000 or 1,500 soldiers by summer 2006 was flawed - it was running at many thousands.
We called it the perfect storm, because we knew that we were heading for two considerable size operations and we really only had the organisation and manpower for one. And therefore perhaps we should have revisited the decision that we the UK would lead an enlarged mission in southern Afghanistan in 2006. Perhaps we should have done that. We didn't do that.
We did, however, have the commander of the British forces in Helmand in 2006, Brig Ed Butler, saying: "We were underprepared, we were under-resourced, and most importantly, we didn't have a clear and achievable strategy to deliver success".
In my conclusion, I wrote that it was all very well having these ex post facto confessionals, but the point was that it was obvious at the time that the campaign was failing and was doomed to failure.
For these "highly-paid incompetents", I wrote, "to be admitting that they got things wrong, when they were paid to get it right – and amply rewarded with rank, baubles and privileges for so doing – is simply not good enough".
What comes round, goes round. Despite Dannatt's protestations, we see in the Business Insider the headline: "The US military plainly failed in Afghanistan. The generals need to answer for it", asserting that: "As US forces leave Afghanistan, the generals who led them need to explain how the war reached such a dismal end".
Rather than an anticipatory lament for what fate may befall Afghans in the weeks or months just ahead, the paper says, what American citizens need - and American soldiers deserve - is a forthright explanation for how a 20-year-long war undertaken by the strongest military on the planet appears headed for such a dismal conclusion.
What applies to the US military, in my view, must also apply to the British forces, although I am not optimistic that anything will be forthcoming. Back in 2014, I wrote that it had only taken the Army five years as a corporate body to convince itself that it scored a stunning victory in Iraq, despite evidence to the contrary.
By the time the whitewash machine has completed its work, I prophesised, the [British] Army will emerge unblemished from Afghanistan as well. I wait to be proved wrong.
Also published on Turbulent Times.
Richard North
07/08/2021
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Friday 6 August 2021
It's a while since I've written about energy policy on this blog and, in particular, about nuclear power and the provision of small modular reactors (SMRs), more commonly known as "mini-nukes".
I note, however, that I was writing about the issue as earlier as 2004, not very long after the EUReferendum blog was established. At that time, I was especially interested in pebble bed technology which I followed for some time. The idea of mass-produced nuclear reactors was by then beginning to be established.
The term "small modular reactor" I came across in 2010, when I wrote - amongst other things – about the "Next Generation Nuclear Plant program" in the United States, and developments in Russia. In the latter example, we saw the KLT-40S reactor designed for their fleet of icebreakers being adapted as a 150 MW unit producing 35 MW of electricity (gross) and up to 35 MW of heat for desalination or district heating. mounted on a 20,000 ton barge for use at suitable locations.
I also introduced a US project under development known as the "Hyperion Power Module", a 25 MW unit measuring five feet by seven, easily portable with no moving parts. It was intended to supply electricity for 7-10 years without refuelling, before being replaced. At the time, the intended manufacturers claimed they would be able to deliver units from 2013 onwards at a price of $50 million.
In the list of countries with projects in hand, however, one notable omission was the UK. But I wrote on the theme in October 2012, advocating a network of "mini-nukes" with one for every [major] industrial estate in the country.
Booker picked up the theme in his column in 2013 and the idea of factory-built nuclear reactors was then rehearsed in 2014, in The Times. On offer was the prospect of small reactors built 20 miles from cities as an alternative to erecting thousands more wind turbines.
By 2019, I was writing in the Mail on Sunday, noting that Rolls-Royce – builder of power plants for Britain's nuclear submarines – was developing "mini-nukes", factory-built plants based on their nuclear submarine experience, which could be installed close to the areas of demand.
In fact, the initiative had been launched in November 2015, with the investment of £250 million, and plans were well advanced by July 2017, when Rolls-Royce published this pamphlet. Later that year, a consortium of companies led by Rolls-Royce was talking to government about public finding of an SMR programme.
Things did not progress well, though. By July 2018, Rolls-Royce was threatening to close the programme down unless government made a long-term commitment to the technology, including financial support.
David Orr, executive vice-president of the Rolls-Royce programme, said that without comfort from the government on two fronts the project "will not fly". He added: "We are coming to crunch time".
Such was the tardy response, though, that it was not until September 2019 that the consortium at last secured £18 million for "Phase 1" development, to be matched by industry funding. This was to be followed by "Phase 2" with the government injecting £500 million, again matched by industry.
With that, the project started to pick up speed – if "speed" was the right word. By January 2020, Roll-Royce was predicting that its reactors could be producing power by the end of the decade, with costs comparable with renewables such as offshore wind.
Plans had firmed up by the end of the year, with Rolls-Royce announcing a programme of 16 plants. Each would produce 440 MW - roughly enough to power Sheffield – at a unit cost of about £2 billion.
Now entering the fray is the Telegraph which, a few days ago, told us that the Rolls-Royce-led consortium had secured at least £210 million in private investment, which would enable it to unlock a matching amount of taxpayer funding.
Getting the first five operating was expected to cost £2.2 billion apiece when prices were expected to fall to about £1.8 billion per plant. Although each unit will produce only one seventh of the output of mega-sites such as Hinkley Point, construction costs there have spiralled from £16 billion to £23 billion, with no end in sight. Seven SMRs will cost substantially less than Hinkley.
The bad news is that the first plant is not expected to be up and running until early 2030. Yet, six of the UK's seven nuclear reactor sites are due to go offline by 2030 and the remaining one, Sizewell B, is due for decommissioning in 2035. Currently, they account for around 20 percent of the nation's electricity generation.
This has not stopped the Telegraph rehashing its earlier story with a new report stating that nuclear reactor production could become Rolls-Royce's biggest business, dwarfing the value of its aero-engine division which has suffered badly from the Covid-19 epidemic.
Yet such optimism is of little use to the nation, when the idiot Johnson has committed the UK to banning the sales of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030, in a move that could add as much as half again to an already over-taxed electricity generation system. With gas boilers also being phased out from as early as 2025 – adding to electricity demand - he is setting us up for a series of prolonged blackouts.
Despite that, the man was in Scotland yesterday, prattling about Thatcher giving us a "big early start" when she closed down the coal mines – while pledging a "smooth and sensible transition" to green fuel during visit to offshore wind farm.
With barely any nuclear energy to provide a stable base load, and fossil fuel plants unable to take the load during those periods when renewables will provide little power, the transition is likely to be anything else than "smooth and sensible".
This man really is an idiot. If he had any sense (a huge "if"), he would be putting the SMR programme on the equivalent of a war footing, in the hope of shaving a few years off the production schedule, while abandoning his plans for the early replacement of petrol and diesel cars, and domestic boilers.
Without that, the SMR programme – encouraging as it is in the longer term – is set to be too little and too late to avoid the inevitable blackouts.
Also published on Turbulent Times.
Richard North
06/08/2021
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Thursday 5 August 2021
Courtesy of an article in the Telegraph, we are learning things about the background to Mohamed Amersi's excursion into high-level whistleblowing and his revelations about the Tory Advisory Board.
According to Con Coughlin, author the article, Amersi's attempts to set up a new body, the Conservative Friends of the Middle East and North Africa (Comena) are being seen as an attempt to establish a more pro-Iranian power-broking outfit in London. He was seeking, it seems, to replace the Conservative Middle East Council (CMEC), which aims to foster better relations with British allies in the region such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Despite Amersi rigorously denies the accusations, it enables Coughlin to re-frame the entire affair as "an astonishing attack on Ben Elliot, the Conservative Party’s co-chairman and chief fundraiser", accusing him and other senior members of Tory HQ "of failing to provide him with sufficient backing in his attempts to set up Comena".
By this means, the whole of the publicity over this affair can be dismissed as pique or some other base motivation. Doubtless, Doubtless, Johnson and his cronies will be hoping that this will allows the whole question of "access capitalism" to be neatly by-passed without the need to address the issues raised.
Rather inconveniently, though, The Times seems to have other ideas. It is accusing Ben Elliot (pictured) – the central figure in this affair – of using his business to help manage party donors and arrange access to prime minister Johnson, despite Elliot's protestations that he keeps his business interests separate from his political activities.
To that effect, the paper has introduced a new name to the growing cast of characters, the Austrian-born Jakob Widecki, Elliot's co-director in a public relations and communications company called Hod Hill Ltd, incorporated on 8 May 2015 and boasting, according to its latest accounts net assets comfortably in excess of £1 million.
Now it is revealed that Widecki also holds a previously undisclosed role in Elliot’s team at Conservative headquarters. The Times has also learnt that Elliot uses his Quintessentially email address, rather than a Conservative account, for party business.
Widecki is described as being "deeply enmeshed" in the Conservative Party’s work. In an email to Amersi in July last year discussing plans for him to meet Johnson and other senior Conservatives, Elliot, who was using his Quintessentially email address, copied in two senior members of Conservative staff: Mike Chattey, the head of fundraising, and James Kerby, a business relations manager.
He also copied in Widecki at his Hod Hill address, meaning the single email incorporated representatives of the Conservatives, Quintessentially and Hod Hill. Elliot told Amersi that Widecki had "all the details" of a "virtual summer party" he hoped he would attend.
The revelation that Widecki simultaneously works for Hod Hill and for the Conservative Party, says The Times, raises serious questions about the crossover between Elliot's political and business interests. Asked by paper what Hod Hill does and how it came by its assets, Elliot declined to comment.
Intriguingly, Elliot's broader political role should have come as no particular surprise. He was the subject of a gushing profile in the Sunday Telegraph in September 2019, under the headline: "Ben Elliot, friend to the rich and influential, aims to make his mark in politics".
Then marked down as listed in the notorious "little black book" of high-rolling contacts maintained by the deceased sex offender – and private island owner – Jeffrey Epstein. Elliot was also a New York dinner guest of Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite who is alleged to have acted as a madam for Epstein.
But, in 2019, the Telegraph had him moving out of the shadows and towards the front lines of politics. Elliot's "elite social and business connections", the paper suggested, "could prove invaluable to the Tories as they seek another round of donations for the next campaign". And thus they proved to be.
Interestingly, the Telegraph reported that the latest accounts had Quintessentially UK Ltd, the holding company for the main concierge business, reported turnover down seven percent to £23.1 million and a loss before tax of £3.4 million for the year to the end of April 2018. That compared with a loss of £2.7m the year before. The declines were attributed to the loss of corporate contracts and bad debts that had to be written off.
As the picture deteriorated, Quintessentially embarked on a restructuring that sought to bring the array of satellite companies which orbited the mothership under central control. They included an estate agency, an art dealership and a chauffeur service.
However, for the year ending 30 April 2019, the consolidated group accounts were showing a revenue of £50.4 million – compared with a group-wide trading performance the previous year of £51.5 million. Gross profit increased from £19.1 million to £20.7 million, but the group showed an operating loss of £3.9 million for the year, compared with £4.5 million the previous year.
Intriguingly, the Telegraph reported back in 2019, control of Quintessentially was shared with the World Fuel Services Corporation, a New York-listed global fuel distributor, headquartered in Miami, with annual revenues of $40 billion, handling 20 million gallons per day worldwide to commercial, government and military users.
In 2011, this company invested tens of millions of pounds in Elliot's empire, in hopes of a joint move into the private airport market, and holding over half a million ordinary shares in the company, making it a major shareholder. World Fuel Services's chief financial officer, Ira Birns, has been a director of Quintessentially since 2012.
Fortunately for Ben Elliot, his US partner - ranked No. 91 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations - has deep pockets, affording his company an ongoing loan facility agreement, with the balance last reported as standing at just over £2 million.
Quite where this leaves us is hard to say, but one small irony cannot escape comment – the fact that Ben Elliot, financed by a multi-billion US fuel distributor, is a friend of millionaire environmentalist and now environment minister, Zac Goldsmith.
What does emerge from the convoluted affairs of Ben Elliot is that it must be virtually impossible to disentangle the skein of interests that he represents, segmenting them neatly into business and political activities. It would suggest that the very last person who should be absorbed into the Conservative Party hierarchy is this man.
Certainly, when Johnson took him on in 2019 as a fundraiser and confident, he must have had a good idea of what Elliot represented. But, as Rafael Behr remarks in the Guardian, when it comes to rules, Johnson simply doesn't care.
And while there is no obvious fallout from the Elliot affair (yet), Behr suggests that there is a slow burn to sleaze. The common theme is arrogance with power and a view that following the rules is for little people and mugs.
The whole business of VIP fast lanes for public procurement and backstage passes to Whitehall cuts against a sense of orderliness and decency that is baked deeper into British culture than the abstract freedoms that Rees-Mogg would trace back to Magna Carta.
In the hierarchy of things that cost a government its support, a law that is unsound in principle comes below a feeling that the rules are arbitrary. A recent dip in Tory poll ratings, Behr thinks, is doubtless connected to the sense that the government is making it all up as it goes along.
And that, he says, comes below the greatest offence of all, which is that rules are not what they seem, applied slyly in a way that lets cheats prosper. Into that category comes the cash for access Advisory Board, and Elliot's wheeler-dealing. This has not set the nation of fire, but it hasn't gone away.
Also published on Turbulent Times.
Richard North
05/08/2021
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Wednesday 4 August 2021
The Financial Times is continuing on the trail of Ben Elliot and the "access capitalism" affair, having a former Conservative MP, Charlotte Leslie, accuse Elliot of mixing his business and political interests.
Despite this adorning the paper's front page, the accusation is nothing new. Delving further into the detail is getting a tad boring, without adding much to our understanding. If anything, more information is muddying the waters, taking us away from the central political issue of corruption in high places.
The situation is not improved by the belated intervention of the BBC which, five days after the story broke in the FT, has finally published a version of it on its website.
Predictably, the broadcaster avoids highlighting the central issue and instead goes for the cheap shot with the headline: "Top Tory marketed much-needed Covid tests to rich clients, says Labour". This is simply a repeat of the already published claim that Ben Elliot's firm arranged for its wealthy clients to buy PCR and antibody tests, at a time when the NHS and care homes "were crying out" for more tests.
Only at the very end of its report does it mention, almost in passing, that Elliot had developed "an exclusive club to connect Tory supporters with senior figures", citing the FT story in which Amersi claims that this was a "very elite" membership with people required to "cough up £250,000 per annum or be a friend of Ben".
There is no mention of the term "access capitalism" and no reference to the Advisory Board, or that fact that this "invite-only" club assured monthly meetings with prime minister Johnson and chancellor Rishi Sunak. In fact, there is no mention of either Johnson or Sunak. The BBC is offering a sanitised version of the story, devoid of political bite.
This reluctance to confront the dark shadow of corruption in high places rather confirms O'Neil's thesis in yesterday's Times about the tendency to avoid the C-word. Instead of saying in plain English that these are allegations of corruption, he writes, we resort to clever-clever phrases and knowing descriptions best uttered while nodding and winking.
O'Neil also notes that we're not quite so shy when talking about what goes on in other countries. Dominic Raab, he writes, recently imposed asset freezes and travel bans on public figures from Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Equatorial Guinea and Iraq and pledged to fight "the blight of corruption and hold those responsible for its corrosive effect to account".
There is certainly the sense that corruption is something that only occurs in foreign countries, as evidenced by Raab's press release from late July. And there was more of the same from Deirdre Brown, Deputy Head of the UK Delegation to the OSCE, who condemned corruption as "the scourge of all, and a serious inhibiter to economic growth". Never fear, though. according to Brown, it "impacts most heavily on the poorest nations".
But while the shrinking violets might steer clear of the domestic application of the C-word, not everyone does, and its use (and the circumstances of its use) does not escape attention, even on distant shores. Take for instance, the British Virgin Islands in the distant Caribbean, which has had a torrid time of late, edging up to a full-blown constitutional crisis exacerbated by the scourge of Covid-19, mired by allegations of corruption from the outgoing governor.
Enter Natalio D Wheatley, BVI minister for education, culture, youth affairs, fisheries and agriculture, speaking on 1 August. "Among some persons", he says, "disillusioned because of what they may perceive to be this society's weaknesses, an ill-advised sentiment has crept into conversations: 'Let Britain take over for a while'".
But he had already set the scene for the rejection of this idea by asserting that the UK is not immune to the alleged deficiencies being scrutinised in the BVI. He then refers to the Guardian, a "reputable publication" which had published an article entitled, "Under Boris Johnson, corruption is taking hold in Britain", with the subtitle: "Cronyism is rife, our system of checks and balances is being dismantled, and ordinary people will soon start to suffer". Johnson's fame has spread far and wide, and the erosion of standards under his administration has not escaped notice – except, it would seem, where it matters.
One reason why the use of the C-word in this article did not gain greater traction in the UK might very well be because it was in that "reputable publication", the Guardian, but an even more certain reason was undoubtedly the author of the piece, Gina Miller – she of Article 50 Supreme Court fame.
Whether it is she, Guardian doyen Jonathan Freedland, writing of the scandals "that should have felled Johnson years ago", or ex-Times foreign editor, Martin Fletcher, complaining in the New Statesman that "Corruption in Britain has reached new heights under Boris Johnson’s government", all these references have one thing in common – they are all from left-of-centre writers.
Thus, "corruption" has become a stick used by the partisan left with which to beat Johnson, triggering a defensive response from the tribal "right" that does not permit the charge to be examined. Party politics has poisoned the well of accountability.
Perversely, this puts in context my complaint yesterday
that the legacy media was not joining the dots and was instead inviting us to see events as sporadic occurrences without picking out common themes or evidence of systemic failures.
No sooner had I published this then we had Yasmin Alibhai-Brown writing in iNews, under the headline: "From paying for peerages to the Queen's lobbying, these six scandals lay bare the corruption of our country". And, along the same lines as O'Neil, her sub-heading declares: "Around the world, the wretched protest tirelessly against corrupt governments. Here the corruption is cleverly alibied and now normalised".
The point is made, but to no avail. A left-wing writer in a left-leaning paper is going to make no more impact than any other commentary from the same political spectrum.
Alibhai-Brown states that old systems based on myths of British incorruptibility are ineffectual and argues that we should tighten the rules, create a robust body to regulate lobbyists and set up an independent committee to eject those who have bought peerages and to appoint people using fair methods.
"Let us clean up British politics – and make Britain truly great again", she concludes, while O'Neil declares that: "Reform of our opaque systems of honours, appointments and political donations is urgently needed before a worsening integrity problem becomes a full-blown corruption crisis".
Even The Times, though, will have little impact. Tribal politics are blocking the debate. There will have to be a full-blown crisis before this government even admits there is a problem. Meanwhile, "access capitalism" is likely to fade back into the obscurity from whence it came.
Also published on Turbulent Times.
Richard North
04/08/2021
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Tuesday 3 August 2021
The "access capitalism" saga seems to be in danger of losing its way, as the Mail takes it up, turning into a tawdry tale headed: "Revenge of Mr Moneybags".
Rather than a tale of "Tory sleaze", which is the main reason why this issue is important, the paper has cast it as a "feud over rival Tory factions" driven by Mohamed Amersi, cast either as "the tycoon who gives to good causes and bankrolls ministers", or the "shadowy figure with alleged Russian links".
Thus, in a long report which focuses on "human interest" and personal details, the paper manages to avoid any mention of the secretive "Advisory Board" profiled by the Financial Time, thereby stripping the tale of any political bite.
And it gets worse. A supplementary report in the same paper is headed: "Tories would not treat me like this if I was white", with Amersi also cited as claiming that the Conservatives "would have treated him better if he had a traditional English name and had been to Eton and Oxford".
Then there is another element thrown in. We learn via Amersi's e-mails that Ben Elliot's Quintessentially company was in April last year offering Covid PCR tests from private healthcare company, Qured, for £295 – at a time when the testing system was under pressure and it was hard even for essential workers to get tested.
This, I'm afraid, is typical of the legacy media, which manages variously to trivialise even the most serious of issues, or distract readers from them, in this case steering clear of the significant political implications of Amersi's revelations in favour of the low-grade soap opera, with overtone of Tory racism and "rich privilege".
Going for the cheap, dog-whistle treatment does of course let Johnson and his cronies off the hook, representing a missed opportunity which, if it is to be recovered, means that others will have to do the heavy lifting.
Had the Mail chosen to stay with the politics and develop the "sleaze" dimension, using "access capitalism" as a foundation, there were two further developments yesterday which could have served as building blocks to make the case for a system off the rails.
The first of these building blocks is the appointment on 1 August of a lawyer specialising in banking and acquisitions as an independent member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the body which "advises the Prime Minister on arrangements for upholding ethical standards of conduct across public life in England", going under the popular title of "sleaze watchdog".
Selected from 173 candidates offering themselves for two vacancies on the committee, the appointee in question is Ewen Fergusson. And what gives this the political edge, picked up by the Mirror and others, is the singular fact that he was a university contemporary of the prime minister and a fellow member of the notorious Bullingdon Club.
Given that Fergusson has no obvious experience, qualifying him for a high-level position assessing standards in public life, Labour's Angela Rayner has remarked that, "Being Boris Johnson’s chum from the Bullingdon Club does not qualify you to sit on the watchdog that is supposed to crack down on sleaze and cronyism in our politics. In fact, it should disqualify you".
Labour's alternative is a "fully independent integrity and ethics commission" which has regulatory and monitoring functions which the Standards Committee lacks. Rayner argues that such a body is necessary to "oversee and stamp out the rampant sleaze and cronyism coming from Downing Street that has polluted our democracy". She may have a point.
This could be especially relevant in relation to the second of yesterday's building blocks, one picked up by the Guardian concerning the parliamentary Committee on Standards.
Belatedly, this body has decided to launch an inquiry, looking into MPs who sit on All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) who lobby for certain industries while being paid by organisations in those same industries, thereby exploiting what is believed to be a lobbying loophole.
One example given, of several, is the former Welsh minister Alun Cairns is vice-chair of the APPG on taxis, which has agreed to "continue pressuring the government to provide urgent financial support for taxi drivers". At the same time, the MP for the Vale of Glamorgan is also paid as a senior adviser to Veezu, the private hire and taxi firm based in Newport.
Another example is Mark Pawsey, the MP for Rugby. He is the chair of the Packaging Manufacturing Industry APPG, the aim of which is "‘to address issues facing the industry from regulation". But Pawsey is also paid £2,500 a month as chair of the Foodservice Packaging Association.
This sort of practice is what many might consider to be the low-grade corruption which dominates the British political establishment, differing only in scale from the "Advisory Board" scenario at the top of the Conservative Party.
It is a classic example of what Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff discusses in her column yesterday. "Money talks", she writes, adding: "Or perhaps more to the point, money gets heard".
However, she then continues: "We know this to be the case in British politics by now, which is why stories that arguably should shock – like the weekend's allegations that Conservative party chair Ben Elliot runs a secretive club of big Tory donors who are given direct access to the prime minister and chancellor – increasingly elicit little more than shrugs".
Sadly, Hinsliff's commentary on this is all too accurate. Drowned out by news of the Olympics and the media obsession with travelling abroad for "holidays in the sun", the impact of these political stories is minimal.
But it would not be untoward to suggest that the public response (or lack of it) is, at the very least, influenced by the way such stories are reported. Taking the "access capitalism" story, for instance, the media has been all over the place, unable to decide as a collective whether this is a political story of part of the royal soap opera.
More generally, each political scandal that emerges tends to be treated as an isolated occurrence, with little sustained attempt to join the dots. Thus, the media effectively invites us to see events as sporadic occurrences and rarely troubles to pick out common themes or evidence of systemic failures.
Perhaps we expect too much if we expect the media to perform this service for us – except, by its own inflated estimation of its worth, the legacy media are forever telling us that they are vital to the functioning of a healthy democracy – which may explain why we have a democracy in name only, while our politicians routinely trash any semblance of accountability or responsibility.
Perversely, Hinsliff herself is sets the standard in her piece for the media's failure. While she opens on the "secretive club of big Tory donors who are given direct access to the prime minister and chancellor", the bulk of her column is about the "veil of secrecy around Prince Charles" which, she argues, "must be lifted". That she seems less concerned about the access afforded by senior members of the government to a group of rich donors tells its own story.
This then brings us to The Times which has the paper's chief reporter, Sean O'Neil, writing about "access capitalism" under the title: "In Britain we keep trying to ignore the whiff of corruption".
To this, we might respond, in the manner of Lone Ranger and his sidekick Tonto, "Who's this 'we' kemosabe?"
Also published on Turbulent Times.
Richard North
03/08/2021
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Monday 2 August 2021
At last, The Daily Telegraph has woken up to the "access capitalism" story. Oddly enough, it is breaking away from the royal "soap opera" line pursued by the Sunday Times, with a report headed: "Prince Charles believes he is 'collateral damage' in Tory 'cash for access' scandal".
This is all about a row engulfing the Conservative Party, with Mohamed Amersi the main protagonist – something previously documented by the Financial Times. This, the paper asserts, has nothing to do with the Prince of Wales.
Helpfully, therefore, the paper pulls the focus back onto the political element with a separate report headed: "'Mr Access All Areas' has transformed Tory party coffers but left series of scandals in his wake", with the sub-heading: "Under Ben Elliot's stewardship the potential for super-rich donors to influence the prime minister appears greater than ever".
This is the nub of the story which the FT is happy to develop with its own report headlined: "The Conservatives and the whiff of chumocracy". Referring to the Tories' "Advisory Board", it then asserts: "A shadowy club of elite political donors increases perceptions of cronyism".
It's the opening paragraph that really says it all, underlining why this story is actually quite important. "Is the UK's democracy for sale?", the paper asks rhetorically – making the assumption that we have a democracy, which is very far from the case. But the paragraph then continues:
A select coterie of financiers and grandees have made substantial donations, some to the tune of £250,000, and gained membership of an invite-only club known as the Advisory Board that has the ear of the prime minister, Boris Johnson, and the chancellor, Rishi Sunak. What is discussed is not minuted. Who is a member is not clear. The very existence of the board is not documented, which is precisely the issue: a shadowy world of privileged access exists. That is a problem for good governance and good government, increasing perceptions of cronyism and sleaze.
As if this was not bad enough, the FT reminds us that donors from the property sector have poured close to £18m into Tory coffers since Johnson became prime minister in 2019.
Housebuilders, the paper says, have long enjoyed strong connections to the party, where an article of faith holds that voters are more likely to vote Tory if they are homeowners. But the proportion of money backing the party from the property sector has soared in recent years to a quarter of all donations, from the previous high of 12 percent of party income enjoyed under Johnson's predecessor, Theresa May.
If it wasn't already obvious, the paper says that "alarm bells then must sound as Johnson is trying to push through a contentious overhaul of planning rules that aims to build 300,000 houses a year; a policy from which the party's biggest backers will benefit.
Undoubtedly, it acknowledges, "Britain has a housing crisis and a longstanding shortage of supply partly underpins it". But Johnson's planned "liberalisation" risks alienating other supporters of the party from greenbelt areas, as well as coming into tension with the government's aim of improving biodiversity.
This, understandably, is another dilemma posed by outsize donations from a single sector. In the unlikely event that Johnson truly believes in the policy – given that he displays no real commitment to any policy line - his motives will be questioned.
Needless to say, after the breakout of the "Advisory Board" story, the Tories insist that donations have no bearing on policy. But this rather begs the question as to why this galaxy of donors is so keen to throw money at the Conservative Party, especially when the Covid PPE debacle clearly indicates that donations to the Party represent an extremely good investment.
Certainly, the FT is unsurprised that donors have extended their largesse to this government, noting that the whiff of "chumocracy" risks becoming overpowering.
Here, the list of examples is becoming persuasive: the pandemic-related contracts for close contacts; a former prime minister lobbying on behalf of a company now the subject of global investigations; and a housing minister who approved a scheme after sitting next to a developer at dinner before having to hastily reverse his decision. Donors, says the FT, might be forgiven for thinking they were pushing at an already open door.
It doesn't matter, therefore, that donors deny they pay for influence – they would say that anyway. What matters is the perception. And if an impression of such leverage were to be perceived, this would not be a new, nor solely Tory, blight. We are thus reminded of the cash-for-peerage scandal under Tony Blair.
Johnson, though, seems to be in a different league. This is a man whose personal finances are chaotic and who initially struggled to explain how he funded a Caribbean holiday and the decoration of his Downing Street flat. He now seems to have a particular donor problem, and with it questions over to whom he might owe a debt.
Taking care to avoid any legal complications, the FT states that there is no suggestion that party donors or the Advisory Board have broken any rules. Mind you, there is no particular reason no to believe that rules haven't been "bent", if the mood takes you.
But the secrecy surrounding the arrangement, the FT thinks, "is indicative of a system that is itself broken". At the very least, the paper says, "there needs to be transparency around whether and on what terms the deepest pockets may gain access to the corridors of power".
That may be the FT view, and the Labour Party, according to the Guardian, is doing its best to make it happen, calling for the publication of the names of ministers who secretly met Advisory Board donors.
Even if they succeed, though, I don't suppose anything would convince Johnson's increasing number of detractors that everything is above board – especially when deeds mean so much more that honeyed words of denial.
Ironically, it is the Telegraph which is drawing attention to this, lamenting that, "The Government has stopped listening to traditional Tories". Two years ago, this paper complains, Johnson promised a government for the people, one that focused on delivering what public opinion wanted rather than implementing the technocratic musings of an elite of economists, lawyers, Westminster insiders and assorted apparatchiks.
Failing completely to join the dots, it neglects to point out that the surest way of getting the government's attention is to come armed with a cheque of £250,000 – or, preferably, more. But experience would now suggest that this is the only way of getting the government's attention. Normal "democratic" processes no longer apply.
It's come to such a state that both the Telegraph and the Mirror are singing from the same hymn sheet. While the former is saying that, if the government does not listen to voters now, it will hear from them later, at the ballot box, the latter writes in much the same vein.
Whether it's VIP lanes for Tories receiving Covid contracts or entitled Johnson behaving as if virus restrictions shouldn't apply to him and his privileged circle, a "them-and-us divide" is turning the political weather against the Tories, the paper says.
It warns that the Prime Minister may one day soon discover that mud sticks – with pay-back time looming as voters grow increasingly angry that he runs the country as if he's above the rules.
That notwithstanding, it will be a long time before the voters are convinced – if ever – that Labour is capable of forming a credible government. But the stench of Tory sleaze is nothing if not pervasive. It will take more than a bit of "transparency" to clear it away.
Also published on Turbulent Times.
Richard North
02/08/2021
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Sunday 1 August 2021
A puzzling aspect of yesterday's "cash for access" story, which I picked up from the Financial Times was the apparent lack of interest shown by the rest of the media. Apart from the Guardian and the Independent covered the report, and then without any great emphasis.
Today, though, all this changes, with the Sunday Times running the story on its front page, with three major reports (paywall), that have already been picked up by the Mail as well as others.
Moreover, in the ST, the issue has acquired a label – an essential characteristic if it is to acquire "legs". It has become the: "access capitalism" scandal.
Initially, the paper frames the story in terms of the egregious Ben Elliot and Prince Charles, with its first report entitled: "Tory chairman Ben Elliot 'peddled access to Prince Charles'", but with the mention of Elliot's day job, up front, the party political dimension isn't very far behind.
What becomes very clear is that the paper is very sure of its ground. It has enlisted Mohamed Amersi, the telecoms millionaire, as a source but also refers to an aristocratic "whistleblower" and a number of supporting documents and leaked e-mail. The establishment (or part of it) seems to be turning in on itself.
Much of what the ST rehearses, though, has already been covered in the Financial Times, although the Sunday paper seems to be gunning for Elliot and his role in Quintessentially, suggesting that the revelations "will raise serious doubts at the apex of the establishment about Elliot's conduct and pose the uncomfortable question of whether he has used his royal relations to bolster his business and his political position".
Amersi has gone public in a big way, having given the paper a video interview, and it is he who describes this current round of "cash for access" as "access capitalism", which the ST thinks will impact on Prince Charles, posing "difficult questions" as to whether he knew that his wife’s nephew was organising for ultra-wealthy clients to meet him.
Asked if Elliot was in effect operating a pay-to-play scheme, Amersi replied: "You call it pay-to-play, I call it access capitalism. It's the same point. You get access, you get invitations, you get privileged relationships if you are part of the set-up, and where you are financially making a contribution to be a part of that set up. Absolutely".
As one might expect, Labour is doing its best to capitalise on the revelations, picking up on the detail of the "advisory board" whereby donors, some of whom have given more than £250,000 to the party, hold meetings with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, the chancellor.
Labour Party chairwoman Anneliese Dodds is leading the charge here and, I suppose, if anything kills this story stone dead, it will be her intervention. She is questioning whether Elliot was doing enough to keep his political and royal worlds separate.
"The latest allegations about Ben Elliot", she says, "reveal the true scale of the 'cash for access' culture there is under Boris Johnson. It cannot be right that Ben Elliot is offering a select group of elite donors privileged access to the prime minister and the chancellor".
She then continues: "And if the inducements to donate to the Conservative Party or become a client of Quintessentially include professing to offer access to the royal family then that is totally unacceptable. So if this has happened then Ben Elliot's position is completely untenable and Boris Johnson has serious questions to answer".
Much of what is said of Prince Charles can be dismissed as just another part of the increasingly tawdry royal soap, so the real damaging stuff will relate to Elliot's role as Tory Party co-chairman.
Amersi suggests that the politics and the royals are closely inter-linked. He tells how he decided soon after becoming a Quintessentially member to pay for the elite tier, the most expensive and most exclusive of three options.
"We decided to be at the very top tier. This very top tier, it was fascinating because we were invited to be exposed to the establishment here, whether it is the royal establishment, Clarence House, St James’s Palace, Buckingham Palace, Dumfries House, whether it is the government and No 10 and other influential aspects of government".
The ST says that documents suggest Elliot used his royal connections to bolster his political fundraising. In one email sent in 2015 — four years before he became Conservative Party chairman — Elliot told Amersi that Charles "spoke highly of you", before requesting a donation to Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative minister and his close friend.
The paper also reminds us that Elliot has already been touched by two major funding scandals. Last year, it says, he faced questions over why he allowed the billionaire Richard Desmond to be seated next to Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, at a fundraiser shortly before the government ruled on Desmond's development plans.
Then, earlier this year, leaked emails relating to the prime minister's controversial refurbishment of his Downing Street flat, showed that Elliot was copied into crucial emails discussing ways party donations could be used for the redecorations.
In effect, Elliot is accused of linking politics, business and royalty. This comes over more in the second report, where Elliot appeared relaxed about the overlap between his three worlds.
The paper describes how, in February 2015 he wrote an email to Amersi with the subject line: "Zac". He opened with a remarkable sweetener: "Dear Mohamed, Hope you are well. I saw the Prince of Wales this morning and he spoke highly of you", before getting to the political point.
"I know we have a meeting set to see Zac", the e-mail continued, "but we are just following up on all of the kind pledges made at the event the other week, so I wanted to get in touch briefly about this. Thank you again for this generous donation to his campaign and let me know the best way forward".
And, as we already know, Elliot would go on to be treasurer of Goldsmith's failed campaign to succeed Johnson in the mayoralty. Then, as soon as he became prime minister, Johnson looked to him to rebuild the party’s straitened finances.
Since then, as the FT recorded, Elliot raised phenomenal sums for the Tories. In the year running up to the 2019 election landslide, the party brought in a record £37.4 million in large donations. But, we are told, Tory backbenchers have quietly wondered whether he has the temperament and caution to do the job, not least because of his involvement in the Jenrick, and the "wallpapergate" affairs.
With the intervention of the ST, though, the big question is whether, is this "access capitalism" scandal takes off, whether it embroils mainly Prince Charles, or also takes in prime minister Johnson, and makes is life more uncomfortable.
With the public so inured to "Tory sleaze", and having already priced-in the fact that they have a congenital liar for a prime minister, it would be unlikely for a single scandal, in isolation, to end his government – or even seriously damage it.
Generally, it is the accumulation of events over time that does the damage. Thus, in 1992 we saw John Major's Tories elected with a record vote. Five years later, after a succession of "sleaze" stories, Blair swept to victory with the 1997 landslide.
We are just under three years (potentially) from a general election. It is only going to get worse for Johnson. Some believe it will be a miracle for him if he isn't deposed by his own party before that election.
Also published on Turbulent Times.
Richard North
01/08/2021
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Saturday 31 July 2021
An intriguing piece of work finds itself into the Financial Times entitled: "Inside Boris Johnson's money network".
This lifts the lid on some of the financing of the Conservative Party and, in particular, the relationship between prime minister Johnson and "an adept high-society operator" installed by him "to ensure the Tory party was bankrolled at the last election, is flush today and will be well into the future".
This is Ben Elliot (pictured with Johnson), the "impeccably connected nephew of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall," a man who once described himself as a "willing slave to the stars". He is best known for running Quintessentially, a "concierge" company that famously caters to the whims of the wealthy, telling the FT that securing services for his wealthy clients was all about "knowing the right people to contact for the right favour".
Elliot first demonstrated his usefulness to ambitious Tory politicians in 2016 when he acted as treasurer for Zac Goldsmith's unsuccessful London mayoral campaign. "Boris was so taken with how rich [Elliot] is and just how many rich people he knows", a friend of the prime minister says.
Thus, Elliot was one of Johnson’s first appointments after becoming prime minister in July 2019, when he made him the Conservative party's co-chair. Since then, he has been at the centre of the Conservatives' funding operation. He is also Johnson's counsellor, meeting regularly on the tennis or squash court.
Elliot, we are told, has quietly transformed the Party's money culture, partly responsible for raising a record £8.6 million in the first two weeks of the 2019 election campaign. This has been achieved by bringing aspects of Quintessentially's model to the Party, so that ever-larger cash donations bring ever-greater access to the heart of government.
On behalf of the Conservative Party, he manages the secretive "Advisory Board", a hitherto unknown group of elite donors that does not officially exist on any party literature. These donors enjoy frequent and direct access to the Johnson or chancellor Rishi Sunak.
Under Elliot, says the FT, the Advisory Board has become the most desirable club in the Tory party, its members granted monthly access to, retaining as its members some of the money men who had supported Johnson's rise to power.
By way of background, the FT tells us that Elliot is 12 years Johnson's junior, but they have long moved in the same social circle. In the early 2000s, Elliot regularly played poker with Ben and Zac Goldsmith, wealthy environmentalists, at Crown London Aspinalls, a private gaming club in Mayfair.
Johnson, who made the transition from freewheeling political columnist and commentator to Tory MP at about the same time, was also part of the black-tie Aspinall clique.
And you can see how the wheels of influence work, when we see that Damian Aspinall, son of the club's founder, runs an animal conservation charity that recently hired Johnson's wife Carrie as head of communications. Risk-taking, Eton and Brexit, we are told, bound the group together, the members "fiercely loyal to each other", who always look after each other.
Redolent of the 2015 "cash for access" scandal, Elliot appears to be offering access to Johnson in the place of luxury recreation.
Described as effortlessly charming, Elliot will, for example, pitch potential donors in a "mockney" accent, adopting working-class patois, before following up with a steely approach. The FT cites a Conservative HQ insider saying, "He's very forceful".
This source adds that he can be brusque with donors and Tory staff alike, we are told. "Ben squeezes the pips from the donors. His follow-ups for money are blunt, along the lines of 'You owe us the money, you promised us the money'. He's like a bailiff".
Johnson apparently "detests" asking for cash, which has given Elliot great influence over the party's finances. He has done exactly what Johnson asked him to do: he turned the Conservatives into an extremely well-funded machine that wins elections. In the year running up to Johnson’s 2019 victory, the party raised a record £37.4 million in "large" donations, well over three times more than Labour.
Central to Elliot's fundraising strategy, we are told, is networking money to power. Mohamed Amersi, a businessman who has made millions in telecom deals around the world, says he met Elliot in New York. Amersi became a "global elite" member of Quintessentially.
In 2013, Amersi and his partner Nadia flew to Scotland and made their way to Dumfries House, an 18th-century stately home set on 2,000 acres. That night, he says he and Nadia dined with the Prince of Wales. "Ben was the one who invited us to come there", says Amersi of his first meeting with the heir to the British throne.
It was also Elliot, he says, who "started seeking donations from me and Nadia for the Conservative party even before he became chair". Nadia - the Russian-born Nadezhda Rodicheva - gave £250,000 in the run-up to the 2017 election. Another half-million pounds has followed from Amersi since.
That has been enough to buy Amersi membership of the Leaders Group - a longstanding club for Tory donors who enjoy monthly lunches with ministers - but not enough, he says, to join the Advisory Board made up of the highest donors. That club, Amersi says, is "like the very elite Quintessentially clients membership: one needs to cough up £250,000 per annum or be a friend of Ben".
Some senior Tories, we learn, talk of a "250 club" of donors who have given £250,000 or more. This 250 figure certainly features prominently in the recent list of donations to the party. Eight Conservative party donors gave sums of exactly £250,000 in 2020. Three donors have given that specific amount so far in 2021.
Those who have given at least that sum in 2020 or 2021 include Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of former Russian minister Vladimir Chernukhin; hedge fund manager Alan Howard; John Gore, a theatre producer, and Rosemary Saïd, wife of Wafic Saïd, the Syrian-born businessman known for his role in the UK-Saudi al-Yamamah arms sale.
The FT then has senior Tories telling us that the most important donors are tapped on the shoulder by Elliot and asked if they would like to join the Advisory Board, described as being made up of perhaps a dozen members.
And, although there was a "Leaders' Group" where people paid £50,000 to join, Elliot has taken the concept to another level. Since December the Advisory Board has spoken with either Johnson or Sunak on a monthly basis. "It's never below that rank", says one person briefed on its activities.
Members are thought to include Lord Anthony Bamford, of JCB fame, at whose factory Johnson launched his 2019 leadership bid. Others said to be members are Alan Howard and British financier Jamie Reuben.
The FT also reminds us that some of the biggest donations secured for the party come from property companies, who would be major beneficiaries of Johnson's promise to rip up England's highly restrictive planning laws to allow more housebuilding. Donors with property interests and links to development have given the party at least £17.9 million since Johnson became prime minister.
All of this has the Guardian reporting that Labour is calling for Johnson to explain what the "advisory board" is all about. Even if this goes nowhere, what the FT has put together shows that the Conservative Party has become a tool of its rich donors. Ordinary people – the plebs – don't get a look-in. And when we look to see why politics is broken, we are that much closer to knowing why.
Also published on Turbulent Times.
Richard North
31/07/2021
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