At the Conservative party conference in 2021, Nadhim Zahawi met a multimillionaire Canadian businessman who had spent his career in the education sector and, sources said, was interested in discussing it with the former education secretary.
It was not an unusual meeting for party conference, where ministers regularly rub shoulders with lobbyists and campaigners in their various patches at events organised by the Tory party and by external groups, as well as in the bars and restaurants of grand hotels.
However, the individual in question was Sam Blyth, a distant cousin of Boris Johnson who, just eight months earlier, had agreed to guarantee a loan of up to £800,000 to help fund the prime minister’s lifestyle.
There is no suggestion that the conversation was planned, or that Zahawi knew about the loan agreement when he met Blyth. In fact, when the Guardian first asked his spokesperson about it, we were told that he had no recollection of meeting him.
Blyth, however, confirmed that the pair had met. He said: “I didn’t seek out a meeting with the education minister, although I did meet him in passing. Boris Johnson knew nothing about this incidental meeting before, during or afterwards.”
The Tory chair’s spokeperson then clarified: “Mr Zahawi was introduced to Mr Blyth during a brush-by at party conference. As education secretary, many people interested in education policy were interested in talking to him.”
Yet this all raises important questions about access to ministers.
It also illustrates the extraordinarily tangled web of connections at the top of the Conservative party – a point underlined by the controversies surrounding Johnson’s financial arrangements and Zahawi’s tax affairs.
In a separate controversy, Zahawi – previously a business minister – failed to tell his then department about WhatsApp messages with David Cameron, who contacted him in 2020 in order to lobby for the now-collapsed finance company Greensill.
It emerged last year that Zahawi had provided contact details for Richard Sharp, now the BBC chair and then an adviser to Rishi Sunak, but also a friend of Zahawi’s, after being asked for help by Cameron.
Sharp was once Sunak’s boss at Goldman Sachs and was also an economic adviser to Johnson when he was mayor of London. The card-carrying Tory has also donated more than £400,000 to the Conservative party.
Blyth, who was also friends with Sharp, is said to have raised the idea of acting as the former prime minister’s’s guarantor in late 2020 and asked him for advice on the best way forward.
Sharp contacted Simon Case, the head of the civil service, who advised him to stay out of the discussions as he was applying for the BBC role, which he got the following spring.
According to reports, Sharp, Blyth and Johnson had dinner together at Chequers before the loan guarantee was finalised, although they deny the then prime minister’s finances were discussed then.
Johnson was given the go-ahead for his loan arrangement by Case, on the explicit basis that there was no conflict of interest or even the risk of one.
These wealthy men at the top of, and linked to, the Tory party, look as if they belong to an elite club that benefits them all, but that no outsider could be part of. And there lies the real problem for Sunak, as he tries to persuade the public that their priorities are his government’s too.
