This piece is part of a series. Find the full series here.
Last year, C|T Group finally achieved the golden dream for any lobbying firm when one of its former principals was appointed to run the office of the UK prime minister.
It was, alas, all too brief. Prime Minister Liz Truss only lasted 45 days before being forced to stand down after a series of her policies — including abolishing the 45% top income tax rate — triggered a crisis in the financial markets.
The prime minister’s chief of staff was Mark Fullbrook, a long-term conservative apparatchik who had worked on the campaign teams of prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major. In 2010, he was snapped up by C|T as it ramped up its UK operations.
Fullbrook remained on C|T’s UK books as one of its top political operators until May 2022 when he left to set up his own outfit, Fullbrook Strategies. But the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
Fullbrook Strategies’ advisory board includes Lynton Crosby AO. (The other is Johan Christofferson, a hedge fund manager who was a major donor to Boris Johnson in 2019.) Another prominent Australian, the hedge fund manager Michael Hintze, has also been a member of the Fullbrook board.
The Fullbrook manoeuvre — swivelling from a decade with C|T to take the role of chief of staff of the UK prime minister’s office — precisely mirrored the appointment of former Australian C|T head Yaron Finkelstein to the role of principal private secretary in Scott Morrison’s office.
For C|T there had been a smooth transfer of power when Truss became prime minister. Another former senior C|T executive, David Canzini, had been Boris Johnson’s deputy chief of staff.
Johnson had been an admirer of Lynton Crosby ever since the master strategist from Australia ran Johnson’s campaign for London lord mayor in 2008. With only a minor blip here and there, Crosby has remained integral to the UK Conservatives’ campaigning efforts for close to 20 years. (In a sign of C|T’s lingering influence, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has adopted the “Stop the Boats” slogan of Australia’s Coalition government.)
Crosby’s close alliance with the UK Conservatives has given C|T high-level influence with the British government since the election of David Cameron in 2010.
The UK Conservatives have shown their gratitude to Crosby. The Wizard from Oz was controversially knighted at the time of the Cameron government. Health experts were outraged that the man who lobbied for big tobacco was honoured by the government.
C|T’s fingerprints exposed
In the final weeks of Johnson’s prime ministership last year, Britain’s ITV News revealed the extraordinary level of Crosby’s influence. Sir Lynton had allegedly devised a plan to urgently create 39 new Tory-supporting lords in order to push through contentious Brexit-related legislation.
ITV reported that it had sighted a confidential document called “Project Homer”, which it said was drafted by C|T. According to ITV, Project Homer said that having more Tory lords would have helped Johnson avoid over half of the defeats he had suffered in the legislative chamber since becoming prime minister.
C|T had also proposed what it called the “professionalisation” of the Tories’ operation in the House of Lords, with the loyalty of individual peers being rewarded with CBEs for political service, designations as special envoys or advisers to the prime minister, and lunches and dinners at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence.
The report noted that creating 20 peers of a single party at any one time was regarded as a large number and that there was no recent precedent for 39 being appointed. (Johnson already had a record of disregarding established processes in order to appoint lords.)
The saga has strong echoes of Australia under the Morrison government, which routinely trashed convention by appointing political friends to plum positions on government boards and bodies such as the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
When news broke of the secret project, Johnson’s office and C|T dismissed the document altogether.
A 10 Downing Street spokesperson said: “This is not a government document and does not represent government policy. Unsolicited advice is often received — and disregarded.”
C|T called it an “early working copy” of a discussion paper prepared for a think tank, prepared for a “small group of people” to aid discussion.
In October last year, the Australian hedge fund billionaire and Tory donor Michael Hintze was appointed as a life peer as part of the 2022 Special Honours and was subsequently donned Baron Hintze, of Dunster in the County of Somerset.
Crikey does not suggest there is any connection with the political influence scheme reportedy outlined in Project Homer.
Rulers of the Anglosphere
Ultimately C|T’s UK ploy meant the firm had its former senior officials at the apex of power in both Australia and the UK from the day Scott Morrison stepped into the Prime Minister’s Office in August 2018. The arrangement would last almost four years until Morrison was booted in May last year.
In the meantime, the group would pivot to Washington and a slice of the biggest corporate budgets in the world, most critically in defence. Enter clients General Dynamics, the lead contractor for constructing the US Navy’s fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, and Centrus Energy, the leading provider of nuclear fuel for US national security purposes and for naval reactors.
As reported by Crikey in this series, both are set to be among the biggest winners of the “forever” AUKUS defence deal hatched by former prime minister Scott Morrison.
