How the Tory Government works: Access Capitalism & Really Useful Knowledge
The Financial Times (31st July) revealed links between Tory Party Co-Chair and fund raiser Ben Elliott and leading Brexiteers and Thatcherites who pay money to get regular access to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak
Elliott is the niece of Camilla and hence also related to Prince Charles. He runs a company called Quintessentially which caters to the whims and requirements of the extremely rich and there is a separate charitable foundation.
Elliott has told the Sunday Times (1st August) that his work as a Tory fund raiser, owner of Quintessentially and the charitable foundation are separate matters.
The Sunday Times has focused on the activities of Mohamed Amersi, who was originally a lawyer but has for many years been a consultant and advisor primarily in telecoms and appears to have made a good deal of money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Amersi
Mr Amersi has dined with Prince Charles in Scotland and had donated funds to charities run by HRH. He is also part of the Leaders Group, a number of people who donate sizeable sums to the Tory Party and enjoy regular access to Tory Ministers.
Amersi calls all this access capitalism, although it also sounds like the ‘Old Corruption’ of the pre-democratic age before the 1832 Reform Act on which William Cobbett focused. Here it was not so much what a person did or how competent they were that mattered, but who they were and who they knew.
The press are rightly castigated for not probing enough into what the Tory Governments since 2010 have been up but the FT and Sunday Times deserve some praise for writing about the network of Tory power. Something nineteenth radicals would have called it really useful knowledge.
Leave a Reply