Rishi Sunak is facing calls to say how many times he has met the Conservative mega-donor Frank Hester, who made comments about Diane Abbott that have been widely condemned for being racist and misogynistic, after a picture of the pair at a Tory fundraiser emerged.
Hester is understood to have attended two Tory fundraisers in the last year, in June where he was photographed with Sunak, and as recently as two weeks ago at Raffles in London.
The prime minister is also believed to have met Hester in Leeds, the day after the autumn statement in November, when the donor paid £16,000 for Sunak to take a helicopter to the city for a political visit.
No 10 has said it “will not get into details” about whether the two men had a meeting during that trip. On that day, Sunak was pictured hammering jewellery at a workshop in Farsley in north-west Leeds, less than 4 miles from the HQ of Hester’s company TPP.
Downing Street is also refusing to give details of any discussions about AI between Sunak and Hester, who has given £10m to the party and will potentially contribute another £5m – taking his contributions in less than a year close to what the Conservatives spent on the entire 2019 general election.
Hester, who has worked on artificial intelligence as part of his IT business, has previously said he has had “some quite long conversations with Rishi about AI”. The donor also attended an event at Lancaster House where Sunak discussed AI with the billionaire Elon Musk in November.
It is unknown whether any discussions about policy were reported back to Sunak’s department.
Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s chair, said: “Rishi Sunak needs to come clean about the relationship he has with Frank Hester, including how many times he has met with him since becoming prime minister.”
Hester’s meetings with Sunak are the latest in more than a decade of meetings with senior Conservative politicians.
As prime minister, David Cameron took Hester on a delegation to India in February 2013. Hester returned to India with Ken Clarke in May 2013. Jeremy Hunt, then health secretary, visited TPP’s offices in December 2014. Cameron held a rally at TPP’s headquarters in April 2015 during the general election campaign.
The then chancellor, George Osborne, brought Hester on a trade mission to China in September 2015 to herald the “Northern Powerhouse”. In January 2016, Hunt returned to TPP’s newly constructed headquarters.
At the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Kigali in June 2022, Hester met Boris Johnson.
The Conservatives and Downing Street have not denied that Hester has sought to donate an additional £5m, on top of the £10m already formally declared through the Electoral Commission.
According to GB News, the money has been “in the ether for ages” but has yet to be formally confirmed. One unnamed party source told the channel: “He wants to give again. I hope he will.”
The Conservatives are expected to be heavily reliant on paid-for campaigning such as mailed leaflets and digital ads in the general election, in part because of a lack of numbers and enthusiasm in their campaign base.
In 2019, the Tories spent just under £16.5m from a permitted total of close to £19m. However, the spending limits have since been raised, and for Labour and the Conservatives – it is based on the number of candidates fielded – it will be around £34m.
Hester has been at the centre of a political furore since the Guardian reported on Monday that he said in a 2019 meeting that seeing Abbott, who is Britain’s longest-serving black MP, on TV made “you just want to hate all black women because she’s there”.
He also called all his “foreign” workers together to defend himself against online claims he had made racist remarks. During this meeting, he said he abhorred racism and told his team their progress would not be “based on the colour of your skin, your ethnicity, where your parents are from”.
However, he also said: “We take the piss out of the fact that all our Chinese girls sit together in Asian corner.”
After the report, Hester released a statement saying he “accepts that he was rude about Diane Abbott in a private meeting several years ago but his criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin”. The statement said Hester abhorred racism, “not least because he experienced it as the child of Irish immigrants in the 1970s”.
The statement added: “He rang Diane Abbott twice today to try to apologise directly for the hurt he has caused her, and is deeply sorry for his remarks. He wishes to make it clear that he regards racism as a poison which has no place in public life.”
