How lobbying works: a Conservative case study PDF Print E-mail

Monday, 5 October 2009

So, Brighton last week didn’t quite turn out to be a lobbyist-free zone, but the real party, the one lobbyists have been gearing up for starts today.

Publicly, the Tories have been at pains to put distance between themselves and the lobbying industry. On a number of occasions over the past couple of months they have had to rebut lobbyists’ claims that Tory policy is up for grabs. Take their “anger”, for example, at one senior lobbyist who took the liberty of inviting his corporate clients to become “a trusted partner of the government-in-waiting”.

Shadow minister, Francis Maude shot back with a demand for greater “openness and transparency” from lobbyists, namely that they should all 1) come out of the shadows and 2) make public who their clients are.

Is this the Tories getting tough on lobbyists? Not really. Lobbyists have been encouraged to operate in the open and voluntarily declare clients since the cash-for-questions scandals of the nineties. Fifteen years on, a sizeable proportion still refuse to come clean.


To find out why acting tough on lobbyists might matter to the Tories, one needs to look at how the lobbying industry works. Lobbying relies to an enormous extent on people with privileged knowledge and contacts – political insiders.  And at the moment there is no better case study of the revolving door between lobbying and politics than the Conservative party.

First up, with a foot in both camps, are the Prospective Parliamentary Candidates – 28 Tory hopefuls currently work as lobbyists. Many were hired only after they were selected and a few have admitted to already setting up meetings for clients with Shadow ministers. On top of this, if they’re lucky, the consultancies that hire them will have built a lasting relationship with a rising Tory star. The list of lobbyist PPCs is long but includes Cameron’s former press secretary, George Eustice, now at Portland PR, bringing its clients – which includes the alcohol lobbying body and Tesco – that bit closer to the Tory inner circle.

Stepping out of the limelight are the former MPs who enter lobbying on leaving or being voted out of Parliament (as was the fate of many former Tory a decade ago). These include Stephen Norris, the two-time London Tory mayor hopeful, now a consultant to a number of lobbying firms; Sir Richard Needham, 10 years a minister in the Thatcher and Major governments, now working for lobbying firm Tetra Strategy; and Michael Portillo who has just been taken on by Portland PR.

What about the unelected Conservative insiders? Among the party workers to morph into lobbyists recently are Oliver Dowden, former deputy campaigns director at Conservative Central Office, now at consultancy Hill & Knowlton. Lobby shop TLG has snared two former staffers – Henry Goodwin, an ex-special adviser to the party on business and Helen Gale, a former adviser in the Tory Policy Unit, whose arrival was described by TLG’s boss as  a “great scoop for us and our clients”. Again, there are many more.

Other ‘Tory insiders’ to make the move are Stephen Shakespeare (founder of ConservativeHome) and James Bethell who together set up lobbying consultancy Westbourne Communications earlier this year, subtly named after the stomping ground of the Cameroons. Perhaps they hope to emulate Tory big guns Lords Bell and Chadlington, the Chairman and CEO respectively of the UK's two leading PR groups, both of whom own a number of major UK lobbying firms, including Bell Pottinger Public Affairs and Quiller Consultants.

So, what’s wrong with this? Perhaps nothing – lobbyists will have you believe that personal contacts count for nought. But for the rest of us, we should be concerned to know who is acting behind the scenes to influence policy.

Under the Tories plan for voluntary disclosure of lobbying clients this will not happen: Bell Pottinger, Quiller Consultants, Westbourne Communications, TLG – none of these companies reveal who they are working for. One even claims that “the public has no right to know” who it is working for.

The only way the public is going to know who is influencing whom and what they are trying to influence (policy, regulation, government contracts etc) is to have a compulsory, statutory register of lobbyists. This was recommended by a Select Committee in January, and has the support of the Lib Dems, 200 MPs, and if recent polls are to be believed, an overwhelming majority of the public.

Without a commitment from the Conservatives, the public will likely remain in the dark. Is this the “new politics” we’ve been promised under a Tory government?

 

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