Former Prime Minister David Cameron has returned to the limelight for his alleged involvement in a lobbying scandal with a company he advises and the Treasury. He was trying to secure Greensill’s access to a loan program called the Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF). The former prime minister wanted Greensill Capital to be able to issue loans using taxpayer money through this system.
He sent several texts to Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s home phone and addressed two junior treasury ministers.
The scandal sparked a wider row over attempts by private companies to influence ministers and officials.
The government has now asked a senior lawyer to conduct a review of the matter and a report by the end of June, but on Wednesday the Commons Treasury Committee announced plans for its own investigation, further committees planning to do the same.
Mr Cameron, who led the rest of the party in the referendum, resigned after the British voted 52% to 48% to leave the EU.
Before becoming “the man who lost Europe” and even before becoming Prime Minister, Mr Cameron was a “young” and “articulate” leader of the Conservative Party.
Six months after his leadership election in 2005, Mr Cameron appeared on Radio 4’s iconic show Desert Island Discs, in which he spoke about his formative years and even confessed that two Soviets attempted to recruit him during his sabbatical.
He told reporter Sue Lawley: “I can’t prove this to be true, but during my year between school and college, I worked in Hong Kong for a while and then j traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway through Russia.
“It was in 1985 so a kind of pre-Gorbachov and I met a great friend in Moscow.
“We went down to the Black Sea and we were on the beach and these two Russians, who both spoke perfect English, kind of ended up on the beach reserved for foreign tourists.
“They took us to dinner and asked us in a very friendly way about life in England and what we thought about politics.
“Obviously we were both very careful and careful about what we said, but later when I got to college my politics professor said it was a definite attempt. [to recruit me]. “
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In 2011, on an official trip to Moscow, Cameron repeated the anecdote almost word for word to then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and joked that he “failed his interview with the KGB” .
Mr Medvedev replied that Mr Cameron would have made a “very good KGB agent”.
But Russia’s best-selling newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda – a spokesperson for President Vladimir Putin – said the story was false in 2015.
The newspaper quoted Gennady Sokolov, a Russian author and intelligence historian, who said he was assured by high-level secret service sources that there had been no candidacy to recruit the future Tory leader.
He said: “If the KGB had been tasked with working with an unknown 19-year-old Cameron, there would have been some material left on this.
“We cautiously asked knowledgeable people if there was a file on Cameron in the KGB archives.
“We got a definitive answer that there was no such file in the archives, and there wasn’t any earlier. The KGB was not working on Cameron.”
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This notice was published: 2021-04-19 18:30:00
