Only the Tories are election-ready

13 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

Another profitable tactic has been to set up various donors’ clubs — again discreetly, without fanfare. In the pre-Cameron era the most exclusive grouping was the Renaissance Club, open to anyone who donated £10,000. This, nowadays, is chickenfeed to the cash-hungry Cameroons. There is now the Shadow Chancellor’s Club, for those who give £25,000, and the Leader’s Club, whose members each donate £50,000 a year. And what do you get for your money? The chance to dine, at some point, with either Mr Cameron or George Osborne.

The new donors know that the days when such arrangements led to knighthoods and peerages are gone — that is one certain outcome of the loans-for-honours debacle and the ignominy of Tony Blair’s questioning by officers from Scotland Yard. The new cohort of Tory donors are not chasing passports, contracts or gongs. ‘These guys get up at 5 a.m., work until 10 p.m. and have no time for party politics,’ says one fundraiser. ‘They spend two or three months outside the country. But some have friends who can’t afford private school fees. They care about what’s happening in Britain and are fascinated by Cameron.’

A chance to meet the man himself makes for a decent evening’s entertainment for financiers who scarcely notice a £4,000 donation deducted from their weekly budget. They tend to be generous donors to charities, and are seldom motivated by deep-blue ideology. Indeed, many are political only to the extent that they distrust Gordon Brown. Unlike Mr Blair’s donors, they are not attracted by political life — as has been clear from the abject failure of the Tories to persuade a non-apparatchik of stature to run as London mayor. The new Tory superdonors are too busy making money to waste time in politics.