**By piling pressure on the chancellor and Treasury mandarins, the former PM engineered nine meetings to lobby for Greensill**
David Cameron resigned as prime minister and left No 10 in July 2016. But when the pandemic tore through Downing Street almost four years later, it was as if he had never been away.
On April 3 last year, as Boris Johnson was in quarantine, Cameron emailed an old colleague in Downing Street with an extraordinary demand. He explained that the chancellor’s emergency loan scheme to help big businesses, in its current form, seemed “nuts”. The former prime minister told an ex-aide: “What we need most is for Rishi \[Sunak\] to have a good look at this and ask officials to find a way of making it work.”
Cameron’s wanted the programme redesigned to include Greensill Capital: a privately owned financial services firm that was in trouble. Having met its founder — Lex Greensill, the son of Australian sugar cane farmers, while in No 10 — Cameron was working as an adviser to the company. He held share options worth tens of millions of pounds. A personal fortune was on the line.
The Treasury had written to Greensill that day rejecting the idea of giving the company special help: the Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF) was a way for the state to lend money to blue-chip companies, not to a financial services start-up. Charles Roxburgh, the Treasury’s second most senior official, spoke for Sunak, having “obtained a view” directly from the chancellor. The conclusion was firm: “We cannot consider your request further.”
However, Cameron would not take no for an answer. He began a lobbying campaign that soon secured Greensill special access to the Treasury’s most senior officials. The financier was able to pitch his ideas and exert his charms at the highest levels of government for months.
[Greensill Capital](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/david-cameron-lobbied-no-10-and-hancock-for-greensill-nht3x2c5z) later became an accredited lender under a separate scheme, granting taxpayer-backed loans worth almost half a billion pounds.
A year on, Greensill Capital is in administration having imploded under the weight of its debts. Cameron’s share options are worthless. The company’s collapse threatens 55,000 jobs globally, including 5,000 in Britain. Johnson has not ruled out bailing out Britain’s third biggest steel business, Liberty, which faces bankruptcy as a direct consequence of Greensill’s disintegration.
### Questions for Cameron
For these reasons the list of questions about Cameron’s conduct keeps growing. Was it proper for the former prime minister to lobby ex-colleagues directly on behalf of a toxic firm in which he had a financial interest? How was a private citizen able to bend Whitehall to his will?
Cameron has refused to comment on the affair. A “friend” suggested on Friday that he regretted texting the chancellor. But today, emails leaked to The Sunday Times reveal in Cameron’s own words further attempts to lobby insiders . They also pose questions for the chancellor.
It all began at 2.23pm on April 3, 11 days after the start of the first lockdown, when Roxburgh sent his rejection letter to Greensill, saying helping his company would create an unhelpful “precedent” for the Treasury. The department’s scepticism made sense.
The CCFF scheme was designed to give temporary taxpayer-funded loans to the biggest companies in Britain: retailers, construction giants or manufacturers which, in their own right, were deemed to make a big contribution to the economy and had to be saved at all costs.
In contrast, Greensill, a plucky finance start-up, wanted to do something entirely different: use taxpayers’ money to issue its own loans to small and medium businesses left vulnerable to late payments or a lack of cash due to the pandemic.
Sunak was not unsympathetic to such concerns: the Treasury, though, was designing other schemes to address them. To give Greensill a role under CCFF, the Bank of England would have to change its “market notice” — the rules set for the financing scheme.
Cameron was undeterred. His first port of call was an impressive young MP who entered parliament in 2015, only to disappoint him by backing Brexit the next year: Sunak himself. Perhaps the chancellor would have better news for his old master now. Cameron texted him asking to talk. The response was polite: “I am stuck back to back on calls but will try you later this evening and if it gets too late, first thing tomorrow.”
Cameron looked elsewhere. He contacted two MPs who had served under him and were now ministers in Sunak’s team, John Glen and Jesse Norman.
He also rang Sheridan Westlake: a veteran special adviser whose No 10 career encompassed Cameron, May and Johnson’s tenures, and whose focus, business, made him the ideal contact for the moment. He got through and the pair spoke.
At 5.28pm, Cameron sent a follow-up email, telling Westlake it was “great to talk” and putting his cards on the table, saying he needed to “find a way of making it work”. The former prime minister added: “It seems nuts to exclude supply chain finance \[Greensill’s speciality\]. We all know that the banks will struggle to get these loans out the door — and so other methods of extending credit to firms become even more important.”
Cameron attached a detailed list of bullet points outlining what Greensill wanted and why, explaining that the company had the “scale, technology, UK-based staff and capability” to make a real difference.
They at once exhibited confidence and desperation, with one stating: “Surely HMG \[Her Majesty’s Government\] should be seen to be supporting UK Fintechs \[financial technology groups\].”
There was also a warning: failure to help Greensill would “almost certainly” mean that businesses across the country would not get the help they needed.
Cameron signed off the memo: “All good wishes, DC.”
### Treasury changed stance after ex-PM’s lobbying
Like many ideas put forward by Greensill, who liked to speak in language about “democratising finance”, it was never said explicitly who the real winners were likely to be: not the taxpayer or businesses people but his own company.
There was scant mention of the company’s core business model either: paying a company’s invoices upfront in exchange for a fee.
In any case, the official is understood to have forwarded Cameron’s request on to the Treasury. What happened next is unclear. But within days of Cameron’s lobbying, the Treasury’s outright “no” suddenly turned into a “maybe”. Even though Johnson was now in intensive care, and his ministers were grappling with the biggest postwar crisis, Sunak’s officials were made to find the time to hold Zoom meetings with Greensill to hear more about its ideas.
On April 7, Tom Scholar, the Treasury permanent secretary and Roxburgh held a virtual meeting with Greensill representatives, who “had been thinking hard about how they could propose something that fits with the purpose of the CCFF” and would not require the market notice to be changed. If the official view was that their original plan did not work, then the Australian financier would happily work up something else that did.
The Treasury considered Greensill’s revised ideas and appeared willing to be flexible. On April 15, Roxburgh wrote, saying Greensill’s tweaked plan still “doesn’t address our central problem” — but that an alternative he had proposed on the phone might work. “We and the Bank \[of England\] would be happy to discuss the details of this approach and could move ahead quickly on this basis.”
###
