As racist, misogynist and generally incitement provoking remarks go, Frank Hester’s are not even borderline. Looking at Diane Abbott makes you “want to hate all black women”, he told a meeting at his healthcare technology firm in 2019. “I think she should be shot … It would be much better if she died.”
Not exactly nuanced, is it? Not much light and shade there. And it was not just about Abbott, this country’s first black female MP, though that was already more than enough. It was also about his company’s Chinese workers, its Indian workers, and about Malaysians, not just on one occasion but on several. Was it racist? If the word means anything, which it does, then of course the remarks were racist, even if the man himself says he abhors racism.
In which case, how come the government machine and the Conservative party were so exceptionally slow to respond – and in particular to respond decisively – to the Guardian’s exclusive? The story went live just after 3pm on Monday. But it took more than 24 hours – which is a very long time in the online political world – for Rishi Sunak to finally accept the words were racist. Even when he did, it did not feel as if his heart was in it.
For it’s not as though Sunak, busy man though he undoubtedly is, does not know who Frank Hester OBE is. On the contrary, he knows exactly who Hester is – and, even more, why the Leeds-based entrepreneur matters. Hester’s company, the Phoenix Partnership, of which Hester is the sole owner, gave the Conservative party a £5m donation last May. It gave the party another £5m in October. The party has confirmed that Hester is now its “biggest ever donor”.
What is more, Hester also paid for a helicopter flight by Sunak last November from Battersea in central London to Leeds-Bradford airport, which is located close to Phoenix’s Horsforth headquarters. In addition, he has also secured a cool £135m of contracts with the Department of Health and Social Care in the past four years alone, and a total of £400m since 2016. Hester is a very big player in a world that was central to the spending commitments promised in Jeremy Hunt’s budget last week, with its pledge to spend £3.4bn – that’s billions not millions – on NHS IT systems, something in which Phoenix specialises.
So there is no way that the notoriously thorough and meticulous Sunak would not have sensed danger when he first saw the words “Hester” and “racism” appearing in the same sentence on whatever device he was using on Monday evening. Even a fool, which Sunak is not, would hear a loud political alarm bell when his biggest millionaire donor was reported as saying that one of the country’s most prominent black women should be shot.
And it’s not as though the prime minister has no one working for him to shut down dangerous stories quickly. Upwards of 40 people are now said to work inside the Downing Street warren on communications and media. Their main task, one assumes, is to monitor and respond to the hundreds of political stories running daily in mainstream and social media. There is no way that a story like the Hester allegations would not set off a red alert. Yet it looks as if, in this part of central government, more is less.
There’s also no way that some other ministers and backbenchers would not have privately pressed Sunak for stronger action, including giving back Hester’s £10m, as soon as they caught wind of the story. On Wednesday the West Midlands mayor, Andy Street, and the Scottish Tories each went public with their unhappiness about Sunak’s attempt to hold on to Hester’s donations. Those donations are terribly tainted. But the doubters were in the minority at a defining moment.
It was not always this way. More than 50 years ago, and in an incomparably less strident media world, the then Tory leader, Edward Heath, was immediately bombarded with shadow cabinet resignation threats after Enoch Powell, then shadow defence secretary, delivered his “rivers of blood” speech against immigration. That was a much bigger crisis for the Tory party than the Hester affair, but Heath sacked Powell far more quickly than the time it took Sunak to decide it was more important to keep hold of Hester’s money.
The reality is that Sunak still faces an insuperable struggle to control his fissiparous party. In the Commons on Wednesday, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, accused him of being scared of his party. The reality is more that the party has become unmanageable, just as it has been under every Tory leader since David Cameron. Even a leadership genius would struggle to do a good job, and Sunak is not Napoleon. The result is that he does not have the authority to condemn Hester outright, let alone to spurn his cash, even if he wanted to, which seems doubtful.
The whole episode is an illustration not just of the weakness of this particular government, but also of a prime minister who only a week ago appeared to take a stand against hate and extremism. Standing back further, it may also point to a deepening weakness of arguably any government of any kind. Like other democracies across Europe today, Britain is faced with powerful centrifugal political forces fed by economic stagnation, social fracture and the weakening of the nation state. Values that were once shared are in fact still much stronger than many suppose, but the reluctance of Sunak to take a stand on the Hester revelations is a clear sign of how far they have now begun to unravel.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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