Last year, while I was working on a late draft of my novel Best of Friends, a story broke about a club known as the advisory board. It was organised by the former Conservative party co-chair Ben Elliot, and made up, at least in part, of donors paying £250,000 to the Tory party. It was an odd thing to read about, given that I had invented for the novel a club called the High Table for political donors who paid £200,000 to the party of government – I’d wondered if I was setting too high an entrance fee. I’m not claiming any kind of clairvoyance, just as I won’t claim clairvoyance for inventing a British-Pakistani Tory home secretary who becomes embroiled in a high-profile citizenship-stripping case in Home Fire, which was published before Sajid Javid became home secretary and stripped Shamima Begum of her British citizenship. All I had been doing in both cases was paying attention to news stories when they were still minor rather than headline news, and thinking about the directions in which they could and probably would move, given Britain’s political climate.
In the case of clubs for political donors, my antenna had started twitching at the end of 2019, when I read an article on openDemocracy about the Leader’s Group, a dining club open only to those who donated £50,000 to the Conservative party. I experienced one of those “Aha!” moments that tells you you’ve found something you were only dimly aware of seeking. I was at the time in the earliest stages of writing Best of Friends, which starts in Karachi with two adolescent girls living through a time of political and personal transformation and would end with both of them in London in their 40s, in something close to the present day. I felt a certain resistance to the stories of migration that are told in terms of the discontinuities between the place that was left and the place that is arrived at – the discontinuities can be destabilising or liberating but, either way, it is difference rather than similarity that is generally highlighted. While there’s good reason to write such stories, what are often missed out are the ways in which one place echoes the other. The story of the Leader’s Group sounded to me like an echo between Pakistan and the UK, though far fainter than others such as cricket, word-play and class stratification. I had no idea how loud it would become in the next couple of years.
The novel starts in the last days of the dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq and continues on to the election of Benazir Bhutto, a period of history I lived through when I was 15. There has been nothing in my life to match the feeling of optimism surrounding that election. I felt I wasn’t just watching but experiencing history turn away from darkness. But the euphoria surrounding the 1988 elections didn’t last long. At the time I didn’t see all the establishment forces intent on making sure Benazir’s government failed; I only heard the word “corruption” attached to stories of politicians and their families profiting financially from their positions of power. Corruption soon became the dirtiest of words to throw at Pakistan’s democratic leaders, a marker of how grubby were the individuals and political parties in whom we’d invested our ideals. By extension, democracy itself became tainted. Eleven years later, dictatorship returned, accompanied by a mood of weariness about the battered institution of democracy, which democratic politicians seemed entirely happy to undermine if it helped them hold on to power.
During that 11-year period I looked with envy at older democracies, and particularly at the UK, which once had a version of dictatorship (monarchy) and had evolved over centuries into a democracy so unshakable it didn’t even require a constitution to underpin it. In such a system, institutions such as the judiciary and parliament were sacrosanct, and while there might be individual cases of corruption there was a system of checks and balances, a culture of expectation and precedent, that meant such behaviour couldn’t be flagrant and, if found out, wouldn’t be forgiven.
When I read about the Leader’s Group, I thought about all the people in Pakistan for whom the transition from dictatorship to democracy didn’t significantly alter their relationship to power. There were people who knew their wealth and social network allowed them to experience continuity from one regime to the next – if anything, democracy enhanced the opportunities to leverage their position. Such people would use the language of “favours”, “contacts” and “business decisions”. I imagined the ways that someone who had grown up in Pakistan in such a family might look at a club for political donors in the UK, and see both opportunity and familiarity. I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t overstating the familiarity. There was, after all, transparency around political donations in the UK, as they had to be declared. But transparency didn’t seem to cross the threshold of the Leader’s Group soirees: there was a grey area around who among the donors were also members of the Leader’s Group, which government ministers they met, what conversations went on between the financiers and those whose campaigns they financed.
When news broke of the advisory board in 2021, the Conservative party confirmed the group’s existence and the fact that it “occasionally” met with the prime minister and the chancellor – other sources said the meetings were monthly. No details have been forthcoming about conversations at those meetings or membership of the group. The Conservative party has always said that donations have no bearing on policies, but public perception probably aligns more closely with an (in retrospect, astonishing) intervention from Cameron in 2010, on the brink of his premiership, a time when his name was associated with modernising rather than Greensill. Cameron was talking about the dangers of “secret corporate lobbying”, and his comments included this:
“It arouses people’s worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works, with money buying power, power fishing for money and a cosy club at the top making decisions in their own interest. It’s an issue that … has tainted our politics for too long, an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money.”
Within two years of that speech, it was revealed that the Tory party co-treasurer Peter Cruddas was asking for up to £250,000 in donations to the Conservative party in return for access to the PM and the chancellor; at the time, it was enough of a scandal to force Cruddas’s resignation. It’s startling how the Cruddas quid pro quo overlaps with what the advisory board allegedly asks for and promises in return – except no one had to resign, or even promise transparency, in response to the revelations about it. Only a handful of people donate enough to the Tory party to qualify for the advisory board, if the £250,000 price tag is correct; they include Cruddas. In 2021 Boris Johnson became the first prime minister to overrule the advice of the House of Lords appointments commission when he ennobled Cruddas. Three days after taking his seat in the House of Lords, Cruddas donated £500,000 to the Tory party.
The reporting on the advisory board was one of many news stories that linked the Tory government to cash for access, or cronyism, or the “chumocracy” in recent years. There was the controversy over Cruddas’s peerage; the MP Owen Paterson’s successful lobbying for more than £600m in Covid contracts for Randox, who paid him more than £8,000 a month as a consultant; the government’s illegal use of a fast track VIP lane to award Covid PPE contracts, which included the £40m handed to the then health secretary Matt Hancock’s pub landlord; the housing secretary Robert Jenrick’s unlawful approval of a housing scheme linked to the Tory donor Richard Desmond, whom he sat next to at a party fundraising event. It was hard not to feel the problem was systemic rather than one of a few bad apples.
Increasingly, I found myself remembering the rumours in Pakistan, in those early days of democracy, of suitcases of money being exchanged for government favours. It’s true that the acts I was thinking about in relation to Pakistan would have been unmistakably corrupt, whereas the publicly disclosed donations and consultancies in the UK are entirely legal. They don’t necessarily involve any blurring of ethical lines beyond the fact that they come with access to politicians that most people won’t ever have. Being born into a certain social group, going to a particular school or university might also give you that access, and this isn’t something anyone can or should draw up rules against. Having said that, finding ways to legitimise cash for access via private dining clubs isn’t any kind of step forward for democracy. As Cameron said in that 2010 speech: “We don’t know who is meeting whom. We don’t know whether any favours are being exchanged. We don’t know which outside interests are wielding unhealthy influence.”
We have only to look at recent events in the US to see how murky the world of political donations can get. In the Senate, Joe Manchin is the leading recipient of donations from the energy sector; in August, he forced a rewriting of the Democrats’ climate bill to include concessions for the fossil fuel industry before he agreed to cast the vote that would allow the bill to pass. It is truly bizarre to know that the most significant climate-related legislation in American history would not have passed without changes demanded by a politician bankrolled by the energy sector. Bizarre and yet accepted as the way democracy in America functions. But what kind of democracy is this?
It’s a question many of us have been asking these last few years, as populist leaders undermine democracy’s key institutions; in the UK we’ve seen the proroguing of parliament; ministers attacking both the judiciary and lawyers who frustrate their attempts to act in ways that are unlawful; a government that acts as though exempt from the laws it imposes on its citizens. Some days I think back to December 1988, a moment I saw democracy come alive in a country, and I wonder if what I’m witnessing now in the UK is democracy in aged infirmity. What looks like continuity (democracy weakened from within by its own representatives) is actually progression from one end of a life cycle to the other.
Then I recall the day, a few months earlier, that dictatorship started to end in Pakistan. It was August, early evening, and the phone in the hall rang. I answered and my aunt asked if my parents were home. On hearing no, she told me that General Zia had been killed, his plane exploding mid-air and I must let my parents know as soon as they returned home. Later that evening my mother came running into the room my father and I were in to say General Zia was dead. Oh! I said, and told my parents about my earlier conversation. Why on earth hadn’t I mentioned it, they wanted to know. Because my aunt was well known for tall tales and wild speculation, I said. It was only when writing about that August day that I understood I had dismissed that conversation before I hung up the phone because I simply didn’t believe it was possible that the man who’d ruled Pakistan for 11 of the 15 years of my life could cease to rule. And in the weeks that followed, I didn’t believe it was possible that there could be democratic elections rather than another dictator replacing Zia. And even if there were to be, there was certainly no chance that a 35-year-old woman would be elected prime minister.
I tried to resist hope, but Karachi was quickly overtaken by a soundtrack of campaign songs and political rallies and festivity and I was swept up in the head-spinning feeling of change coming. Increasingly, I’m grateful to have experienced a time when everything was beautiful and possible, idealists looked like clairvoyants, and a refusal to believe in change for the better wasn’t smart or savvy, it was just the sign of an atrophied imagination. At a time when the most obvious continuities between nations and continents are climate catastrophes, Covid, inflation and populist leaders, I try hard to remember what that time of hope felt like – even if it is, at present, the faintest of echoes.
Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, £16.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
