AN MP who is one of Rishi Sunak’s key backers also works for a PR firm implicated in distributing an anti-Sunak “mucky memo.”

Liam Fox is an important supporter, speaking out in support of Sunak from the start of the campaign. Fox is a long-standing figure on the right of the party, so his support for Sunak, who is perceived as leaning slightly to the Tory “left,” is important.  

Fox’s support indicated Sunak could call on all wings of the Tories: it was useful because Sunak faced challengers perceived as being on the more “headbanging” right, like Priti Patel and his final challenger, Liz Truss. Fox denied he had been promised a Cabinet job by Sunak, although he would clearly welcome a return to a top position.

I say “perceived” because this affair shows the Tories are a band of warring sisters and brothers.

Since last September Fox has moonlighted from his job as an MP with a £20,000 a year role as an adviser to WorldPR, a public relations firm based in Panama.

WorldPR is Patrick Robertson’s firm. Robertson has a long history of working with the Conservatives. Robertson also has a long history of working for foreign dictators: he helped get Augusto Pinochet free from detention in Britain and has represented authoritarian regimes including Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.  

As well as being Fox’s sometime-boss, Robertson is involved in the Tory leadership campaign. The Times got a hold of a copy of an anti-Sunak “mucky memo.”  The “created by” metadata showed the document had been passed on by Robertson — he told the newspaper that he had circulated the document but had not written it.

The anti-Sunak dossier was shared widely among Tory MPs. It accused the former chancellor of many sins, including “wasting” pandemic money, breaking Conservative manifesto commitments not to raise taxes and “publicly lying” about his wife’s non-dom tax status.

The “mucky memo” said Sunak had “enabled Boris Johnson’s reckless over-spending,” and “wasted £32billion on track and trace tech that never delivered.”

It said Sunak “wrote off £4.9bn in Covid loan fraud as a result — in the words of Lord Agnew, his own minister — of ‘arrogance, indolence, ignorance’ and ‘schoolboy errors.’”

The memo said Sunak “delivered a failed March 2022 Budget that was a welter of contradictions, tax raises and sleights of hand that defied analysis, logic or comprehension.”

It also had more personal attacks, saying Sunak “publicly lied not once but twice when seeking to explain his wife’s ‘non-dom’ tax status” and “secretly held a Green Card to work in the US 18 months into his Chancellorship of Britain.”

The “mucky memo” generally attacked Sunak from the right — for not cutting taxes enough — but also threw pretty much everything it could at the former chancellor.

So key Sunak supporter Fox working for one of the anti-Sunak memo distributors looks surprising.

Or it does until you realise how the Conservatives are a party of “frenemies.” They get angry with each other because they want each other’s jobs. They get angry because they always want to go “further” to the right than is sometimes possible.

But they are an ideologically close band. They all want to help the City and corporate leaders hang on to their money and power and all want to throw varying degrees of money at the middle class — and prejudice at everyone else to make that happen.

So, the “vicious” war between Sunak and Truss is an argument about whether the rich and big corporations should get big tax cuts, with a few crumbs for the middle class and cuts for the public sector right now — or a bit later.  

Because the Tories have — with the support of the mainstream media — closed the debate in politics down to who leads the Tory Party, public politics is trapped in this narrow field — a field so narrow that Fox can support one side while having a job linked to the other side.

Labour could try break open this right-wing consensus by proposing some actual social reform, but unfortunately Sir Keir Starmer has decided this is the time for bland slogans instead.  

OCS still cleaning up thanks to government outsourcing

THIS Friday security officers at British courts will be on strike in the first of four one-day walk outs. The guards are trying to squeeze a decent living out of OCS, one of many companies that cashed in on privatisation over the past 40 years.

The security guards are being offered just 27p an hour above the National Minimum Wage. They want a pay deal that has a bit of dignity, instead of a penny-pinching one. They want the Real Living Wage as a minimum and full occupational sick pay.

OCS seems to have had a good pandemic. It and many other privatisers did well from the government’s Covid spending. The government gave so much of this cash to private firms doing public work because it wanted to make sure the pandemic benefited outsourcers rather than enlarging the public sector.

Family-owned OCS began life as Office Cleaning Services. It still has cleaning contracts, along with security and other “facilities management” work. Since Thatcher got privatisation going, it has done especially well from government outsourcing. OCS has around 17,000 staff, (for comparison, Serco has 50,000 staff worldwide).

OCS Group UK Ltd has only published accounts up to December 2020, covering the first year of the pandemic, showing it did well from the outbreak.

2020 turnover was £430 million — this was about £2m down on 2019. But profits more than doubled — they increased by 114 per cent — to £3,833m.

As the annual report says: “On the whole the company has proven to be very resilient through the global coronavirus pandemic.” Covid gave it extra government business as “the company saw increased demand for our essential services, ensuring the safe operation of vital infrastructure in healthcare and government.”

OCS did also lose business due to Covid thanks to closures in the “retail, hospitality and aviation sectors,” but it got £25m in “government grants” to make up for these losses.

According to the accounts, OCS’s highest-paid director actually took a 14 per cent pay cut in 2020 — but as their reduced pay was still £370k a year, this is hardly a sacrifice.