David Cameron, Regrater Lex Greensill & Cobbetian ‘Old Corruption
Regrater or Forestaller was the term used- particularly by radicals-in the eighteenth century to describe what has more recently been known as the middleman.
That is someone who inserts themselves between a supplier and a buyer and makes themselves a profit out of it.
That is essentially what the story of Greensill, the global financing company that has gone bust threatening thousands of jobs including 5.000 in the UK steel industry, is about.
It is a complex story, some parts of it as yet remain unclear. The media have focused on David Cameron who was PM when Greensill got Government business and then went on to work for the Company. Culture Minister and statue obsessive Oliver Dowden defended Cameron as a ‘man of integrity’. As a Sunday Times Editorial (28th March) noted Cameron doesn’t actually have a reputation to lose.
Greensill was from an Australian farming family that went bust after a bad harvest. He came to the UK and got employment at Morgan Stanley. Here he met Jeremy Heywood, a civil servant, who was on secondment in the private sector.
Heywood returned to Government as Head of the Civil Service in the Cameron-Clegg Government. He died in 2018.
In Government Heywood seems to have promoted Greensill to Cameron.
As the Sunday Times story indicated Greensill’s business was about supply chain finance. He would act between the supplier and the buyer and aim to speed up payments for a fee.
Only one scheme actually happened.
This allegedly was about addressing the issue of chemists receiving late payment from the NHS for prescriptions they dealt with.
Here we find the core of the issue and it was about austerity.
If there was an issue of late payment it should have been sorted out by the Government and the NHS. Greensill was entirely unnecessary to the matter. Indeed under the previous Labour administration a plan had been agreed to address it. It was not implemented.
This was the age of austerity and Cameron-Clegg wanted a Small State and public sector. Hence anything that could and should have been done by the Government that could be passed to the private sector was.
As the report underlined the scheme was not much used because the commission charged by the banks that were making payments to the chemists came to more than any loss they might have made through late payment.
The BBC have reported that Cameron has told a Treasury Committee on 13th May that:
he had felt the firm’s proposals would help small businesses access cash during an economic crisis, and were “absolutely in the public interest”.
This statement does not accord with reality. One wonders if Cameron actually knows that or is simply lost in a world of self-justification?
It is any way the world of William Cobbett’s Old Corruption before 1832 in 2021. Cameron made a lot of money out of this. Not specifically out of the NHS contract but as a consultant to Greensill. He told the Committee he was paid considerably more annually than the £150K he had earned as PM. If he had been hired for his specific expertise he might have suggested that the NHS scheme was not only not going to help but would end up adding cost. He was however hired not for his expertise in anything but because of who he was- an ex-PM.
The BBC has now revealed (August 9th) that Cameron is believed to have made around £7.2m doing part-time work for Greensill for two and half years. Cameron has said that he was only one of several advisors and had no role in any decisions. He did however lobby the Goverment over 50 times to provide public funds for Greensill
BBC Report
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