Tugendhat’s fundraising “blew rivals out of the water”: is he Britain’s next Foreign Secretary?
Posted by admin978 on August 11, 2022 · Leave a Comment
In recent weeks H&D has been looking closely at Tom Tugendhat, who finished fifth in the contest for leadership of the Conservative Party but is now tipped to be Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary when Liz Truss becomes Prime Minister next month.
And official records published this morning show that Tugendhat raised more than £123,000 in donations – vastly more than his leadership rivals. (These donations contributed to the rapid rise in his profile, meaning that a man who has never been even a junior minister is now in line for one of the top three posts in the next cabinet.)
Almost as soon as his campaign began, Tugendhat received £25,000 from a company controlled by Sir Mick Davis, a South African born Jewish businessman who for eight years chaired the Jewish Leadership Council, described as “responsible for the strategic imperatives of UK Jewry”. He was knighted in 2015 for “services to Holocaust commemoration and education”.
Together with a fellow tycoon, Sir Mick Davis paid the legal expenses of a Tory MP who made false allegations against the anti-Zionist former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Another £42,000 donation came from a company jointly controlled by Sir Christian Sweeting, a property developer who was charged with a firearms offence in 2001. The firearms charge was later dropped with Mr Sweeting awarded costs, but his bad luck with unfounded suspicions continued later the same year when his premises were searched by Devon & Cornwall police fraud squad.
And hedge fund tycoon Ian Mukherjee (a generous donor to the pro-Remain campaign before the 2016 Brexit referendum) gave Tugendhat £50,000. Mukherjee was a partner and managing director of Goldman Sachs for fifteen years.
Tugendhat’s donations dwarfed those to rival campaigns. For example Rishi Sunak has so far declared only £3,195 in donations (in the form of free office space). Though admittedly Sunak’s personal and family wealth means that he scarcely needs donors.
It’s not yet clear why Tugendhat needed quite such a vast campaign war chest, bearing in mind that his campaign was in theory targeting only 357 fellow MPs, many of whom he would already know personally.
His reported £123,000 in donations worked out at almost £4,000 per vote, but if Britain ends up with its most pro-Zionist Foreign Secretary ever, some of the donors might think their money well spent.
