By Press Release
The people of Brighstone, Calbourne and Shalfleet have spoken and it’s official, the Conservatives are on the ropes.
When the rest of us get our say at the national polls, I predict there’ll be a bloodbath at least as bad as Tony Blair’s landslide which sent John Major’s Tories into oblivion. When parliamentary careers end, senior politicians inevitably cash in. The biggest names can earn a fortune, although I hope no one paid David Cameron for his dire forecasting skills. ‘Call me Dave’ confidently predicted the number of migrants would reduce to ‘tens of thousands.’ Last week we learned over a million have arrived in just 12 months, although with our failing public services, you have to wonder why they want to come.
Multinationals pay ex-politicians vast sums of cash just because they once held influential positions; their evident lack of ability seems irrelevant. Not all of them wait until we chuck them out before getting stuck in; remember Owen Paterson? He was found to have lobbied on behalf of Randox, who were paying him £100,000 a year on top of his £84,000 MP’s salary. Paterson broke parliamentary rules repeatedly, and the Standards Committee wanted to suspend him. Boris Johnson, then PM, tried to get him off the hook, which proved to be a tipping point in his own downfall. Paterson eventually resigned, while claiming not to have done anything wrong. Last week it was announced he wouldn’t pay his £7,500 fine because he wasn’t VAT registered. That’s the kind of loophole that only parliamentarians could dream up, but without that VAT number, Patterson doesn’t qualify as a lobbyist. So that’s that then; time to ‘move on’, as they say in politics.
Wrongdoing in parliament infuriates the public and the reputation of politicians remains in the gutter, which brings me to Baroness Mone. Elevated to the House of Lords by David Cameron, her first vote was to support a £1,300 a year cut in tax credits for low-income families. Then she tweeted that people should “work hard” and not “look for excuses” for poverty. Mone helped found the Ultimo underwear brand, so perhaps Cameron was impressed by the former model’s decolletage. If you’re in bras, pants and politics, inevitably you attract media interest. Mone’s business career began in the marketing department of the Labbatt brewery, perhaps that’s what attracted Cameron – the last 12 years has proved beyond doubt that the Tories couldn’t organise a ‘party’ in a brewery without help.
Ms Mone later became Labbatt’s head of marketing, and, when redundancy followed, she admitted to having lied on her CV to get the job. Lots of us have done that, but how many of us have had £29 million magically appear in our offshore family trust fund? It’s alleged that Mone secretly received this astonishing sum from the profits of a PPE firm set up by ‘close associates’, specifically to win government contracts. As an insider during the Covid crisis, Mone was ideally placed to recommend the firm, PPE Medro, to ministers. It’s claimed her involvement helped secure VIP fast-track contracts, when normal procurement rules were (illegally) ignored. The company got over £200 million pounds worth of Whitehall PPE orders, although much of the stuff they supplied was useless.
We’ve yet to get a penny back but, thanks to leaks from HSBC, some awkward questions mean it’s now all under police investigation. Baroness Mone is innocent until proven otherwise, and, like Paterson, denies any wrongdoing, so only time will tell if there’s been any criminal activity.
You have to wonder when thousands of people were dying of Covid, what kind of person thinks, “How can I make some money from this?” The residents of Brighstone, Calbourne and Shalfleet seem to have worked out the answer!
Header image: pic: Instagram
