Nobody in Parliament or No 10 should be lobbying for foreign governments 

At the height of the 2009 Commons expenses scandal, the then Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, warned that “political lobbying was the next big scandal to happen”.

Over the twelve years that followed, this prediction has become increasingly true. But unlike the expenses scandal, it hasn’t come out in one moment of revelation. Lobbying scandals are a slowly increasing stench that surrounds SW1 – so common and so prevalent that the word “scandal” barely applies. Certainly no one can any longer claim to be shocked, as new revelations appear every few weeks. 

While the UK can, at times, feel like a divided country, there are actually plenty of things that we can unite on. And one of these is a sense that we deserve probity and constancy from those who make our laws. An ardent Brexiteer who argued passionately for a sovereign Parliament and a passionate Remainer who believes in the strength of international laws and norms can both agree that the first loyalty of any parliamentarian should be to the people of the UK. 

And most people would agree that we should not have people making and testing our laws, who are being paid by those with links to a non-democratic, despotic and murderous regime. But that is precisely what is currently happening. 

In May it was revealed that Baroness Finn — Boris Johnson’s Deputy Chief of Staff — part-owned a company that is working with the Saudi Arabian government. This week, we learned that former Chancellor Phillip Hammond has “multiple dealings” with the Saudi government. Despite this, he still sits in the House of Lords and holds the Conservative whip.

The Saudi government has been found to have directly murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It has locked up and executed hundreds of prisoners of conscience. The crackdown on freedom in the Kingdom has been increasingly brutal under the rule of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman – despite initial hopes that he would usher in a more liberal era. 

In order to divert scrutiny from the dark side of the Kingdom’s behaviour, the Saudi government and its business allies are pouring money into lobbying, as well as hosting and bidding for international sporting events, high profile celebrity appearances and even conferences for the international political elite. Indeed, David Cameron himself attended “Davos in the Desert” in October 2019 – a year after the murder of Kashoggi. 

A short time later, he also went on a now infamous camping trip with his then business partner Lex Greensill and Mohammed Bin Salman himself. This has now been swept up as part of a much wider lobbying scandal involving the former Prime Minister as he used and abused his insider contacts on behalf of Greensill. 

As we (hopefully) come out of the Covid era, there will inevitably be probes into the awarding of internal contracts and the lobbying done on behalf of those with too-close relationships with current government ministers. But it is essential as we investigate lobbying, that we should not forget the role of those representing foreign and corrupt governments in our sovereign Parliament. 

As Britain re-establishes her “soft power” post-Brexit, it will be decisions made by this Parliament that will establish what kind of country we want to be and what example we want to set. 

Is Britain a country where we are comfortable that those we entrust with making and overseeing our laws can sell their time to — and profit from — governments whose actions, especially on human rights, we might otherwise wish to oppose? How do we retain our moral standing in the world if we allow just anyone’s money to flow into the pockets of our parliamentarians? 

If the UK is to be a beacon of liberal probity in the world – as surely most of us aspire to be – then we must be the first to live these values. And that means we must root out and clear up the muddied world of lobbying by corrupt foreign actors. No one should be allowed to sit in our sovereign Parliament while in the pay of another government. Full stop. 

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