SOME ministers are accepting less hospitality after they embarrassed Labour in the 2024 “Freebies controversy” when they greedily grabbed free Taylor Swift tickets and so on.

But not Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds: he is all there for the freebies, like accepting a pair of VIP Chelsea Flower Show tickets worth £1,770 from Lloyds Bank this May.

Reynolds’s flowery freebie does not appear in the Register of MPs’ Interests because he decided Lloyds entertained him in his “ministerial capacity,” so it is listed in the less well known Register of Ministers’ Interests: Reynolds acknowledges Lloyds wanted to treat him to this smart flower-based event because he is a government minister.

The Flower Show was in May, but official registers showing who got taken to the show only appeared last month, in July. Reynolds enjoyed the “Gala and Preview” package, which the Flower Show says is an “exclusive preview” of the gardens with “the finest champagne and canapes served throughout the evening with live music” and “the chance to meet experts in garden design.”

Last year Reynolds defended his government accepting high-value hospitality, arguing it is “not a perk of the job, it’s part of the job. People want to engage with decision-makers. They want to ask you to be aware of what they are doing.”

So in Reynolds’s mind he was doing us a favour by consuming the “finest champagne and canapes” because it gave “decision-makers” from Lloyds another chance to “engage” with him.

In return, Reynolds’s government does big favours for Lloyds. Reynolds’s fellow cabinet minister Rachel Reeves wants to tear up the regulations imposed on Lloyds and other banks after they helped cause the 2008 financial crisis.

Even more strikingly, Rachel Reeves offered Lloyds another massive favour by exerting influence over the “car finance” scandal case.

Many drivers buy cars using car loans, often arranged by the dealer who sells the car.

Banks face a big compensation bill because they had secret agreements with those car dealers called “discretionary commission arrangements.” Banks gave higher bonuses to car salesmen for setting higher interest rates on those loans.

The dealers had a hidden financial interest in lumbering customers with higher interest payments. The Financial Conduct Authority banned these “discretionary commission arrangements” and some key Supreme Court cases decided how much compensation car buyers who used these loans will get.

Rachel Reeves actually wrote to the Supreme Court to tell them to take the banks’ side over the cheated and ripped-off car buyers. Reeves pressed the court to make sure consumer awards were low to avoid customers getting a “windfall” at the expense of Lloyds and other lenders. Lloyds’ possible exposure to the car loans scandal was so big they put aside £1.2 billion to cover possible compensation.

It looks like Reeves helped persuade the court to make decisions that will lead to a lower compensation bill: with the Labour Chancellor favouring banks over ordinary consumers, it is easy to see why banks want to take Labour ministers to fancy Flower Show galas.

Reeves’s decision was not only bad for the ordinary consumer, it was also probably bad for the economy: when banks had to pay out billions in compensation in the similar “PPI” scandal, the payments actually helped an otherwise stagnating economy, because unlike banks, ordinary consumers spent the cash, in a kind of accidental Keynesian mechanism.

Lloyds sponsors the Chelsea Flower Show, using it to entertain “important” people.

According to the Register of MPs’ interests, that mostly means Tories: Lloyds took former Tory MPs Jeremy Hunt and Harriett Baldwin to the same event. Finance firm Fenchurch Advisors took former deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden to the same Flower Show Gala, offering an even higher-level VIP experience: Dowden’s two tickets are valued at £3,300.

Jonathan Reynolds’s corporate-freebie-accepting approach means he mixes with bankers and Tories.

Flint 
The June Ministerial Hospitality register, released this month, shows Jonathan Reynolds is still schmoozing with corporates, albeit more modestly.

His dinner partners, rather than the value, are the striking thing here. In June, KPMG took Reynolds for dinner, worth £75.

Labour promised to reduce government reliance on management consultants, but Reynolds’s KPMG dinner suggests otherwise. In 2023 KPMG were fined £23 million and given a “severe reprimand” because they had been the auditor of PFI giant Carillion: their checks on Carillion, which unexpectedly collapsed causing a crisis at NHS hospitals and other PFI schemes, had not been “reliable.”

Also in June Jonathan Reynolds was taken by Flint Global for another £75 dinner. Flint are both a management consultancy and a registered lobbyist. They promise corporate clients they will “provide advice at the point where government and business meet.”

Flint Global’s current clients registered in the European Union include gig economy firm Uber, vape firm JUUL and Glencore, a giant commodity trader that buys and sells oil, coal, metals and agricultural crops.

Glencore has faced many scandals over pollution and bribery. In May 2022 Glencore paid a £280m British penalty to settle seven counts of bribery brought by the Serious Fraud Office, relating to bribes paid by Glencore agents and employees worth over $25m for preferential access to oil.

Flint Global are developing close relations with Labour: since October 2024, James Purnell, formerly a minister in Tony Blair’s Labour government, has been chief executive of Flint Global.

In March 2024 Flint hired Sam White to advise clients on “how the Labour Party works.”

White served as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff in opposition from 2021-2022.

From 2023-4 disgraced former Labour minister Jacqui Smith was also a “specialist partner” at Flint Global. The firm said she helped Flint and their clients because of her “experience of government as a minister at the top level.” Smith left Flint last year because Starmer put her in the Lords and made her an education minister.

Reynolds says he wants to “engage with decision makers” by accepting their hospitality.

So he wants decisions made by big banks, firms who were fined for covering up PFI failures and the lobbyists for vape firms and companies charged with bribery.