It has been such an atrocious six days for Rishi Sunak that his most lowering point was not Lee Anderson, the gargoyle the prime minister appointed as deputy Tory chair, giving him the finger by declaring that he was jumping ship to the Faragiste Reform party. The destabilisation of the Tory leader by that nasty defector has been trumped by Mr Sunak’s abysmal absence of judgment over Frank Hester, his noxious donor.
This is far from the first time in British politics that a prime minister has been engulfed in trouble because of his links with a moneybags. The test of leadership is how it is dealt with. Faced with Mr Hester’s disgusting remarks about one of our most prominent black politicians, the Tory leader utterly failed the test by initially refusing to denounce the donor’s comments as racist and setting his face against relinquishing the cash he has poured into the Conservative treasure chest.
Whenever a monster scandal breaks, Number 10 issues instructions to ministers about “the line to take” when they are put up in front of a microphone. “The line to take” about Mr Hester ought to have been crystal clear as soon as the Guardian revealed what he said during a meeting at his healthcare technology firm in 2019. What he said was: “It’s like trying not to be racist but you see Diane Abbott on the TV and you’re just like, I hate, you just want to hate all black women because she’s there, and I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot.”
The response this demanded ought to have been a slam dunk to a Conservative party sincere in its claims that it does not tolerate racism in any form, from whatever quarter. Rapid and unequivocal condemnation was required, along with an unambiguous declaration that the Tory party would be severing all associations with the Leeds-based businessman. A statement to that effect could have been written and released from Downing Street in 10 minutes. Yet more than 24 hours of pathetic squirming and ghastly excuse-making passed before Number 10 belatedly and under intense pressure issued a statement calling it “racist and wrong”.
This was squeezed out of the prime minister’s office only because of interventions from Kemi Badenoch, the most senior black woman in the government, and William Hague, the former Tory leader who is usually one of Mr Sunak’s loudest cheerleaders.
In the interim, ministers were fielded on the interview circuit to defend the risibly untenable position that the donor had not been guilty of racism, slavishly echoing Mr Hester’s own claim that he was “rude” but is not a racist. According to the businessman’s explanatory statement, he believes that racism “is a poison that has no place in public life”. He has a strange way of showing it. Or, rather, a totally odious one, which left the victim of his attack saying she found it “frightening”.
The Oscar for worst supporting actor in the cabinet goes to Mel Stride for his insistence that Mr Hester’s remarks were not “gender-based or race-based” when anyone with a grasp of the English language could see that’s precisely what they were. This reluctance to condemn the Tory donor followed Number 10’s refusal to agree that Lee Anderson was an Islamophobe when he was suspended for peddling the grotesque smear that the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, was controlled by Islamist “mates”.
The Tory leader’s failures of judgment have given his morose MPs another cause for despair on top of all the other reasons for them to be miserable. Their most common explanation for his behaviour is that the prime minister is simply useless at politics. Inept he may be, but Mr Sunak is not stupid. He can surely recognise racism when it is so blatant. He has sometimes spoken of the pain racism caused him when he was growing up. And he has said that “whenever we see it, we must confront it”.
So why is he finding this so very hard? It could be because he recently invited himself on to everyone’s television sets on a Friday evening to call for tolerance and mutual respect while denouncing threats to parliamentarians which meant “MPs do not feel safe in their homes”. That’s rather hard to square with being bankrolled by a man who said an MP “should be shot”.
Michael Gove has just issued a new official definition of extremism and declared that the government will not fund any group it believes to be inciting hatred and violence. That’s rather tricky to reconcile with the Tory party being happy to trouser and keep shedloads of dosh from a donor who said that the sight of a parliamentarian aroused hatred and thoughts of violence in him.
Mr Sunak has taken shelter from his critics by saying that because he is prime minister and his cabinet is diverse this proves there is “no place for racism” in his party. That’s evidently not entirely true. It is accurate to say that we now have a parliament that looks more like the country it represents than used to be the case. This transformation began with trailblazers. Ms Abbott was one of those pioneers when she became the first black female MP in 1987. The Tory leader might have acknowledged that for one of his donors to speak about her in the despicable way he did was the more vile in the context of the vicious racist abuse she has had to endure since she entered parliament.
The most baleful of the prime minister’s attempts to deflect from this scandal is his suggestion that no one should be challenging him about racism in the Tory party because it is present in other parties too. I’ll take no lectures from you was his basic line of defence against Sir Keir Starmer at an ugly bout of prime minister’s questions, which descended into a your-party-is-more-racist-than-mine slanging match. If this was a preview of what the election campaign is going to be like, we will all need an ample supply of medicine to suppress nausea. Labour has indeed been toxified by racism in its recent history, but that can be no excuse for the Tory leader failing to confront the evil when it raises its head on his own side.
I am driven to the conclusion that the main reason the prime minister can’t get this right is the money. Had Mr Hester been someone who gave the Tory party the occasional fiver, Number 10 would surely have gone full-throttle with denunciations of his remarks and instantly declared him persona completely non grata in Conservative world. That’s what it would have done to a local councillor who expressed a desire for someone to put a bullet in a member of parliament.
Mr Hester is getting the softly-softly, let’s-forgive-and-forget treatment from Downing Street because he is the largest donor the Tories have ever had. He gave them £5m last May, another £5m in the autumn, and the Conservative party is not denying a report that he has bunged them a further £5m, which has yet to appear on the public register of the Electoral Commission. It may be one of those bizarre coincidences which are so weirdly common in the politico-business nexus that this munificent donor owns a medical company that relies on substantial contracts from the National Health Service. To make Mr Sunak’s embarrassment the more excruciating, the Yorkshire magnate picked up the £16,000 bill for one of the helicopter flights that the prime minister is so extremely fond of.
The £15m should be handed back – or, better still, given to anti-racism charities. There are some Tories who grasp why they shouldn’t be hanging on to such terribly tainted cash, among them Chris Patten, a former party chair, and Andy Street, the mayor of the West Midlands who is up for re-election in May. The ethical imperative for surrendering the money is that the Conservative party is otherwise saying that it doesn’t have a problem with being associated with racism, misogyny and expressions of violence towards an MP. The political case for relinquishing the Hester gold is that the Conservatives will struggle to put a lid on this scandal if they don’t. The Tory leadership has no good explanation for why it is clinging on to the filthy lucre. There is only a bad one, which is that it doesn’t want to deplete its election campaign war chest.
At least we can say that this episode has brought clarity about the prime minister. Everyone now knows his principles have a price point. He’s for confronting racism whenever he sees it – unless there’s money involved.
• Andrew Rawnsley if the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
