LONDON — David Cameron's government has not enjoyed much success in predicting the future of the British economy, but the prime minister's political foresight has not entirely deserted him: Last year, following the News of the World hacking controversy, he forecast that lobbying was "the next big scandal waiting to happen." Lobbying, he said, has "tainted our politics for too long" and become "an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money." Greater transparency, said the prime minister, was needed to rid British public life of the suspicion that a chosen few were able to purchase power and influence.
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That chicken came back to roost this week, as newspaper reports revealed the extent to which lobbying companies with close ties to Cameron's government boast of their ability to influence British government policy. If British voters could ever comfort themselves with the thought that the level of influence peddling regularly observed in Washington was unheard of in Whitehall, those days are over.
An investigation published by the Independent created a fake Uzbek business conglomerate called the "Asimov Group" that asked some of the most prominent British public affairs companies to help improve Uzbekistan's dismal image. (The story was a British update of a similar sting pulled off by investigative journalist Ken Silverstein in Washington in 2008.) Of the ten companies approached by the Independent reporters, five expressed an interest in representing the Asimov Group in London.
Of these five, Bell Pottinger -- a public affairs firm founded by Tim Bell, formerly Margaret Thatcher's media advisor during her time in Downing Street -- was the most enthusiastic. The company's managing director, Tim Collins, himself a former Conservative member of parliament, boasted that Bell Pottinger had "all sorts of dark arts," some of which could not be put in a written presentation because "it's embarrassing if it gets out."
Secret recordings of the meetings between Bell Pottinger and the Asimov Group showed Collins cheerfully admitting that "a number of [our client] governments have had serious reputational issues."
Bell Pottinger, however, would be happy to represent the Uzbeks -- one of the most repressive regimes in the world, whose state-run textile industry makes great use of forced child labor -- provided the Uzbek government was willing to change its ways. Collins told his would-be clients, "[That] justifies why a PR company is representing a country which previously people shouldn't have been talking to. Now it actually wants to change it is fully acceptable."
According to another Bell Pottinger excutive, "As long as you can see that each year is a little better than before, that's fine." The company cited work it had previously done for the government of Belarus, another totalitarian country in dire need of better publicity in the West but one unwilling to make the kind of reforms that might win such goodwill honestly. "In our work for Belarus, nobody knows who paid us," said the executive. In other words, in the murky lobbying world, transparency is a fine, but not necessary, thing.
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