Although he is far to soft on David Cameron, and although he fails to see that the EU is in fact central to all of this and that the people whom he rightly excoriates fanatically support it, Will Hutton
Is the Tory party becoming the vehicle for a rootless, amoral global financial community with little loyalty to country – or even to great business? I ask, in part, because of the character of the guest list at their parties.
Last year, the venue for the Tory summer fundraising dinner was the old Billingsgate fish market, this year a grand private members' club.
Russian property developers, a Greek shipping tycoon, an Iranian investment banker, a Slovenian private equity magnate, Bermudan and Dubai-based financiers mingled with a medley of their British counterparts and stars of the Tory party.
Guests worth together a cool £11bn were gathered to be tapped for cash, a skill at which the party has become a dab hand.
Is the Tory party becoming the vehicle for a rootless, amoral global financial community with little loyalty to country – or even to great business? I ask, in part, because of the character of the guest list at their parties.
Last year, the venue for the Tory summer fundraising dinner was the old Billingsgate fish market, this year a grand private members' club.
Russian property developers, a Greek shipping tycoon, an Iranian investment banker, a Slovenian private equity magnate, Bermudan and Dubai-based financiers mingled with a medley of their British counterparts and stars of the Tory party.
Guests worth together a cool £11bn were gathered to be tapped for cash, a skill at which the party has become a dab hand.
The organising committee of the
events is chaired by passionate Eurosceptic Howard Shore, founder of Shore
Capital, a private investment company. The model is American fundraising
dinners.
Someone rich, usually on the organising committee, sponsors a table and then persuades very rich friends or part of the committee's network to pay typically a £1,000 a head to join the table, which will be graced by a member of the cabinet or the London mayor.
Billingsgate, for example, raised £250,000 in table charges before the event even began.
Altogether, around £500,000 this year was raised by the auction alone. Auction proceeds and table charges will bring in directly around £1m, but after Billingsgate last year another £1.1m was registered as donations in the week after the event.
A useful return for one dinner.
But money never comes completely free.
Although there was the usual kerfuffle about whether some donations conformed to electoral commission rules, you can be sure that the donors will have taken care to be on the British electoral roll and donations made within the albeit not very strict rules.
Both the donors and the Tory party would be crass to try and dodge them.
As for direct influence, many of the donors want no more than to keep the Labour party out of government and to use part of their fortune to support what they would characterise as the party of liberty, freedom and enterprise.
They are not directly lobbying any particular policy concessions, although the access and private mobile numbers could one day be helpful. To be part of the Tory conversation with the possibility of influence is enough.
Nor can the Labour party, with its own summer fundraising event coming up this Wednesday at London's Roundhouse, cry foul too loudly: its supporters will want to be part of Labour's conversation in a very similar way.
Even if there were public funding of our political parties, be sure they would still hold such events to raise additional funds.
The concern is much more deep-seated and profound than whether party fundraising rules have been broken – or whether the events and their guests are sufficiently transparent, important though both questions are.
What is striking about the invitation lists for both the Billingsgate and Hurlingham events is who is not on them. Mainstream business and finance were conspicuous by their absence.
The big money guests are people from the darker side of global capitalism, using the leverage available in the shadow banking system over the last two decades to make fortunes in property and private equity.
I could spot no great innovators or business builders.
They are almost entirely populated by the new seekers of risk-free profit, congratulating themselves on their entrepreneurial acumen when in truth their skill has been to borrow aggressively as private or family-owned companies at a time of rising asset prices away from the prying eyes of public shareholders or regulators.
And then to use the many unregulated and untaxed gaps in the new global economy to hide the financial results from the authorities.
Too many for my taste have toppled over the edge and are embroiled in battles with varying authorities in their former homelands for alleged fraud or tax evasion.
Small wonder Central Office was so reluctant to confirm the guest lists.
Their wealth seems proof positive in their own eyes of their genius, as well as in the eyes of uncritical members of the Conservative cabinet who bait the tables at which they sit.
Nor is it any surprise that in the main they should be enthusiastic libertarians impatient not only of the state but of loyalty to country.
Some sponsor exclusive US-based libertarian business associations such as the Milken Institute or Concordia Summit.
They perch temporarily in Britain because it has both a hyper-relaxed attitude to "wealth generation" and is a very agreeable place to live – you even get invited to Tory fundraising events.
Paying taxes is optional, regulation is cursory, the chance of prosecution minimal and in any case eminently defensible by Rolls-Royce lawyers against an under-resourced Serious Fraud Office and Crown Prosecution Service.
The Tory party invokes its great tradition with portraits of Disraeli and Churchill, both of whom would turn in their graves at the new company their heirs are keeping.
The aim is to complete "the project" with the 40:40 strategy : hold 40 marginals and win 40 more to win a parliamentary majority in 2015 to press on with dismantling the state, the social contract and Britain's EU links. In this, the party will be backed by our overwhelming centre-right press.
Constituency associations, rarely more than a hundred strong, will nominate Eurosceptic libertarians as their standard-bearers – a brand of conservatism philosophically very distant from what their constituents believe Toryism is about – but disguised by the legitimising, comforting mantle of apparently being a commonsense Tory.
This is a party on its way to becoming a multinational libertarian sect, whose preoccupations are no longer those either of much of its electorate or of the business community – wrestling with how genuinely to innovate, invest and motivate workforces in a world of increasingly amoral, ownerless companies so beloved and promoted by the sect.
Nor would the task of building businesses be made easier by departure from the EU, promoted passionately by prominent sect advocates such as Howard Shore or MEP Daniel Hannan.
David Cameron, at bottom a one-nation Conservative, is yoked to a monster. He has kept his impossibly riven party together, for which he is given too little credit.
His successors will find the task very much harder, perhaps impossible. Electorates don't vote for sects.
Someone rich, usually on the organising committee, sponsors a table and then persuades very rich friends or part of the committee's network to pay typically a £1,000 a head to join the table, which will be graced by a member of the cabinet or the London mayor.
Billingsgate, for example, raised £250,000 in table charges before the event even began.
Altogether, around £500,000 this year was raised by the auction alone. Auction proceeds and table charges will bring in directly around £1m, but after Billingsgate last year another £1.1m was registered as donations in the week after the event.
A useful return for one dinner.
But money never comes completely free.
Although there was the usual kerfuffle about whether some donations conformed to electoral commission rules, you can be sure that the donors will have taken care to be on the British electoral roll and donations made within the albeit not very strict rules.
Both the donors and the Tory party would be crass to try and dodge them.
As for direct influence, many of the donors want no more than to keep the Labour party out of government and to use part of their fortune to support what they would characterise as the party of liberty, freedom and enterprise.
They are not directly lobbying any particular policy concessions, although the access and private mobile numbers could one day be helpful. To be part of the Tory conversation with the possibility of influence is enough.
Nor can the Labour party, with its own summer fundraising event coming up this Wednesday at London's Roundhouse, cry foul too loudly: its supporters will want to be part of Labour's conversation in a very similar way.
Even if there were public funding of our political parties, be sure they would still hold such events to raise additional funds.
The concern is much more deep-seated and profound than whether party fundraising rules have been broken – or whether the events and their guests are sufficiently transparent, important though both questions are.
What is striking about the invitation lists for both the Billingsgate and Hurlingham events is who is not on them. Mainstream business and finance were conspicuous by their absence.
The big money guests are people from the darker side of global capitalism, using the leverage available in the shadow banking system over the last two decades to make fortunes in property and private equity.
I could spot no great innovators or business builders.
They are almost entirely populated by the new seekers of risk-free profit, congratulating themselves on their entrepreneurial acumen when in truth their skill has been to borrow aggressively as private or family-owned companies at a time of rising asset prices away from the prying eyes of public shareholders or regulators.
And then to use the many unregulated and untaxed gaps in the new global economy to hide the financial results from the authorities.
Too many for my taste have toppled over the edge and are embroiled in battles with varying authorities in their former homelands for alleged fraud or tax evasion.
Small wonder Central Office was so reluctant to confirm the guest lists.
Their wealth seems proof positive in their own eyes of their genius, as well as in the eyes of uncritical members of the Conservative cabinet who bait the tables at which they sit.
Nor is it any surprise that in the main they should be enthusiastic libertarians impatient not only of the state but of loyalty to country.
Some sponsor exclusive US-based libertarian business associations such as the Milken Institute or Concordia Summit.
They perch temporarily in Britain because it has both a hyper-relaxed attitude to "wealth generation" and is a very agreeable place to live – you even get invited to Tory fundraising events.
Paying taxes is optional, regulation is cursory, the chance of prosecution minimal and in any case eminently defensible by Rolls-Royce lawyers against an under-resourced Serious Fraud Office and Crown Prosecution Service.
The Tory party invokes its great tradition with portraits of Disraeli and Churchill, both of whom would turn in their graves at the new company their heirs are keeping.
The aim is to complete "the project" with the 40:40 strategy : hold 40 marginals and win 40 more to win a parliamentary majority in 2015 to press on with dismantling the state, the social contract and Britain's EU links. In this, the party will be backed by our overwhelming centre-right press.
Constituency associations, rarely more than a hundred strong, will nominate Eurosceptic libertarians as their standard-bearers – a brand of conservatism philosophically very distant from what their constituents believe Toryism is about – but disguised by the legitimising, comforting mantle of apparently being a commonsense Tory.
This is a party on its way to becoming a multinational libertarian sect, whose preoccupations are no longer those either of much of its electorate or of the business community – wrestling with how genuinely to innovate, invest and motivate workforces in a world of increasingly amoral, ownerless companies so beloved and promoted by the sect.
Nor would the task of building businesses be made easier by departure from the EU, promoted passionately by prominent sect advocates such as Howard Shore or MEP Daniel Hannan.
David Cameron, at bottom a one-nation Conservative, is yoked to a monster. He has kept his impossibly riven party together, for which he is given too little credit.
His successors will find the task very much harder, perhaps impossible. Electorates don't vote for sects.
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