Only the Tories are election-ready

Fraser Nelson

10 January 2007

The Conservatives are assumed to be in financial trouble. Fraser Nelson reveals that the truth is just the opposite: the Tory leader has set up a successful fundraising machine that will force Labour into abject dependence on the unions

Never was so much donated by so few. In one night, no less than £500,000 was raised for the Conservative party, smashing all records for a fundraising dinner party. Sam Cameron was minded to pull out when her nanny was taken ill, but she turned up in the end. Though she is anything but a political obsessive, she knows that her appearance at such events has become totemic. There is a new breed of millionaires who will pay astonishing sums to see, hear and touch the hem of the golden couple they believe will soon be in No. 10 Downing Street. With apparently effortless charm, and more or less overnight, the Dave and Sam double act has rescued the Tories’ financial fortunes.

No official figures about the state of the party’s finances have been made public, so the received wisdom is still that the Conservatives are as deeply in debt (and in as much need of state funding) as Labour. The reality, I have discovered, is very different. In a normal non-election financial year some £15 million is routinely raised by the party. Yet last year the figure was no less than £21 million. By the time the Conservatives sell their old Smith Square headquarters, their debt will be down to an eminently manageable £5 million, against some £23 million for Labour.

Everyone involved in Tory fundraising offers the same explanation for the new bonanza. ‘It’s entirely down to David. No modern Tory leader has been so deft with the donors,’ said one fundraiser. ‘He remembers their names, their wives’ names, their business problems, everything.’ Added to this is the indefinable but unmistakable aura of a winner. When asked what difference this makes, my source tilts his head back and rolls his eyes. ‘Night and day,’ he says.

Party fundraisers have lost no time in capitalising on the Cameron Effect. But while the media campaigns are very public, the money-raising is much more discreet and the style is changing, too. Out go the f�tes and raffles, and in come intimate dinner parties for the super-rich held in private London houses. The few dinners which were unwisely held at the House of Commons (and are now the subject of an inquiry by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner) offer just a small glimpse into the vast operation at work across the capital.

The old Winter Ball has been replaced with the Black & White Ball which takes place in Battersea next month. ‘This greatly upset the dowagers on the old Winter Ball committee,’ says one of those involved. ‘But, frankly, they didn’t have the donors on the books to make it work. And who would you rather collect a raffle prize from — a Tory matron or Zac Goldsmith’s supermodel wife?’ Sheherazade Goldsmith’s formal modelling days may be over, but she remains a pin-up for the new Tory groupies.