Sunak under pressure to say how many times he has
met Tory donor Frank Hester
Exclusive: Photograph of Sunak with Hester at Tory
fundraiser last June raises further questions for prime minister
Rowena
Mason, Peter Walker and Henry Dyer
Sat 16 Mar
2024 02.00 EDT
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.”
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