Tory Dark Money Machine is Stepping Up

Plus: a scoop on the English cricket legend caught out by House of Lords standards, and some light listening and reading for the summer

Let’s start with the good bad news: this is my final post before I go on holiday until September. Before I head off, here’s a few things I’ve been following over the last week or so.

First off, I’ve noticed a sharp uptick in political donations from what are called ‘unincorporated associations’ in recent months. Unincorporated associations don’t have to file accounts, list their members or say where their money comes from - which makes them the ideal vehicle for funneling dark money into the political system.

Since the start of 2023, a couple of unincorporated associations who don’t declare their donors have given more than £190,000 to the Conservatives. 

Much was donated by the Carlton Club, an elite £1,700-a-year private members’ club in London’s West End that has supported the Conservative Party for almost 200 years. The Carlton has used its unincorporated association status to donate £130,500 to the Tories since January.

It’s mostly been given as donations of between £5,000 and £15,000 to Tory MPs in ‘Red Wall’ seats, which polls suggest are vulnerable at the next election. Over the same period last year, the Carlton gave just £30,000. 

The Carlton Club does not declare where this money comes from. (Although earlier this year the Good Law Project reported that the Carlton Club accepted a £50,000 donation from a company believed to be run by a major donor of Germany’s far-right.) 

The Carlton is not the only source of ‘dark money’ flowing into the Conservatives from unincorporated associations. Since late June, the United & Cecil club, a secretive Tory dining club hosted at the Carlton, has given almost £50,000 to a handful of Tory MPs in marginal seats, according to the latest Register of MPs’ financial interests. 

The United and Cecil gave £12,000 each to right winger Andrea Jenkyns and Alexander Stafford, and £5,000 each to Peter Gibson, Caroline Ansell, Sarah Atherton, Aaron Bell and Jane Hunt. Again these MPs largely represent Red and Blue Wall seats seen as particularly vulnerable at the next election. 

In March, another unincorporated association, the Midlands-based Leamington Fund, gave the Tories £10,000.

We have no idea who is the ultimate source of any of these donations. 

Unincorporated associations have been used to target money at key swing seats before, where tight rules on party election spending can be particularly significant. As I previously reported, during the 2019 general election, Tory funding clubs spent almost half a million pounds in Labour-held constituencies in the Midlands and northern England.

Unincorporated associations can be perfectly benign. Residents’ groups and amateur football teams often are unincorporated associations. Political donations are often made from unincorporated associations where the source of the funding is reasonably obvious, such as from a group of local councillors to their main party.

But they also can be vehicles for dark money.. The infamous half a million pounds anonymously funnelled to the Democratic Unionist Party, just days ahead of the 2016 Brexit vote, came through an unincorporated association.  

In 2021, a Committee on Standards in Public Life report called for tighter rules on unincorporated associations, warning that they could be used as “a route for foreign money to influence UK elections”.

So two years later what has Rishi Sunak done to tackle this threat? Nothing. This week, however, the British government said it will raise the threshold for publishing details of political donations, from £7,500 to £11,000… 

As some of you might know, I’m a keen cricket fan (and a terrible cricketer.) England has been making a decent fist of the Ashes so far, but one famous cricketing name-cum-peer has been caught out by parliamentary transparency rules recently.

I was reading through judgments from the House of Lords commissioner for standards (yes, there is what passes for a relaxing read in my house) when I noticed that earlier this year, former England cricket captain Ian Botham was found to have breached rules for declaring financial interests.

Botham, a staunch Brexiter, was appointed a life peer by Boris Johnson almost three years ago. In March 2022, Botham signed a contract with Caduceus - which describes itself as a ‘cutting-edge Metaverse blockchain tech company’ - but neglected to register the financial interest for seven months.

In January, the House of Lords commissioner for standards, Martin Jelley, upheld a complaint (props to Dr Alex May) against Botham over his failure to declare the business interest with Caduceus. (Botham says that he forgot as he was busy traveling back and forth to Australia, where he is a UK trade envoy.)

The commissioner found that the breach was ‘minor’ and asked Botham to write a letter of apology (which he duly did). But Jelley did also note that this was the former all-rounder’s second to time to come unstuck over declaration rules, having previously neglected to register his personal services company, from which he and his wife had taken a loan of almost £200,000.

In his report Jelley writes: “It is important for public confidence in the House of Lords that all members, including Lord Botham, register their interests in a timely and accurate fashion.” 

This newsletter heartily agrees - although it is surprised that January’s finding against Botham was reported in a less than ‘timely fashion’. As far as I can tell from sources online, this is the first time it’s been reported! 

Finally, while I’ll be away for the next few weeks I wanted to share some of the things I’ve been reading and listening to recently.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer is the undisputed doyenne of dark money reporting. In this fascinating podcast discussion, Mayer and her colleagues discuss the US Supreme Court, and who has been bankrolling its all-powerful justices. 

I’ve written a lot about political donations to the British Conservative party. So I found this academic analysis of why property and construction interests donate to the Tories particularly interesting.  

Finally, in the coming months expect to see more in this newsletter about the dark money and clandestine influence and lobbying behind climate and the environment. (Such as this piece about how the dark money behind Brexit has been lobbying against net zero.) So the one work-related book I’m definitely taking on holiday is the peerless Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. 

Right, that’s it from me. Have a lovely rest of your summer and see you back here in a few weeks!