UK probe to examine Cameron lobbying scandal

The scandal first came to public attention when financial services company Greensill Capital filed for insolvency in March, with the firm's bankruptcy threatening thousands of jobs in the UK steel industry. 

Media investigations soon showed that the firm's founder, Lex Greensill, had inserted himself into the highest echelons of government under former Prime Minister David Cameron, who since leaving No.10 Downing Street had lobbied on behalf of Greensill among cabinet members.

The revelations expose the seemingly unbreakable links between the City of London — the UK's financial center — and Westminster politics. 

The politics of sleaze

In mid-April, Downing Street announced an independent review of the way representations were made to the government by Greensill Capital and Cameron. 

When Johnson launched the commission, he may have seen it as a way of banking some political capital. It would distance him from the politics of Cameron, in particular his government's highly unpopular austerity measures. 

Johnson himself is under attack for alleged scandals. COVID equipment procurement contracts, for example, were handed out early in the pandemic by the Johnson government so that companies with little or no relevant experience landed contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds. 

In June last year, it was revealed that Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick rushed through a planning permission for a one billion pound property scheme two weeks before developer Richard Desmond donated 12,000 pounds to the Conservative party. Then there is Jennifer Arcuri, Johnson's former lover, who received 126,000 pounds in public money, some of it from London's City Hall while Johnson was mayor.

Paul Heywood of the University of Nottingham, who studies political corruption, described the revelations about Cameron's lobbying as "extraordinary."

"It's either completely disingenuous, it's naive or it's dissembling. He must recognize that it's not the route that he took that's at issue, it's the fact of what he did," Heywood told society magazine Tatler. 

Weak self-regulation

Bernard Jenkin, a conservative MP who led an inquiry into links between government and business a few years ago, said the way to combat the problem is to demand that serving ministers and civil servants report inappropriate conduct by lobbyists. "It's been a culture in Whitehall that's been building up for a long time," Jenkin told the BBC. 

In 2014, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government led by Cameron saw its lobbying legislation pass into law. The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act introduced a register for consultant lobbyists and two bodies were established to oversee this kind of activity.

 "The UK's real problem is that whilst we do have procedures in place to regulate lobbying and post-government appointments, they are just woefully inadequate," Daniel Bruce, chief executive of Transparency International UK, told CNN.

In March this year, the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists found Cameron was not required to have registered his lobbying for Greensill because Cameron was an in-house employee of Greensill and so his activities did "not fall within the criteria that require registration."

Cameron has admitted that he'd lobbied numerous others to discuss using Greensill services in the UK's National Health Service (NHS). 

People don't seem to care

Meanwhile, a recent Times poll gave Johnson's conservative Tories a 14-point lead over the opposition Labour Party.

Ben Page, chief executive of the UK pollster Ipsos MORI, thinks the British public "sadly resigned to this type of thing" as people are "not that concerned about corruption compared to most countries."

"There have been successive lobbying scandals for decades. Each time rules are tightened but then a new one emerges — as long as people do not personally enrich themselves directly I do not expect much change," he told DW.