On Monday night, with confident impunity, the Conservative party staged a grand ritual reenactment of its “cash for access” ethos, hosting a £20,000-a-table fundraiser at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Vladimir Putin’s former deputy finance minister, and one-time Neighbours star Holly Valance, were among wealth-smeared guests invited to bid for a three-pronged dinner experience with Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Theresa May. The horrific meal, which would doubtless mostly feature May patiently trying to clean up the mess made by Cameron and Johnson, eventually went for £120,000 or the cost of 49,792 school dinners at £2.41 a time.
Given that Nadine Dorries had already blabbed, before the confidence vote earlier this month, on how deeply the party was beholden to its donors, you’d think the Conservatives would now be keen to avoid appearing so conspicuously up for rent and would have held the event somewhere secret, such as the vault storing the unredacted Russia report, Sue Gray’s findings on the Abba party and the rest of Johnson’s unaccounted for children.
