The Spectator’s Notes | 31 March 2012

As one who has had the pleasure of meeting Peter Cruddas, without being an undercover reporter, I see the latest scandal about party funding rather differently from most. Mr Cruddas has the curious, attractive unworldliness which often goes with being a very successful self-made businessman. He is the son of an alcoholic taxi-driver from Hackney, and he left school with no qualifications. He took a menial job in a bank and found that he was clever with the tickertape machines of that time (the 1970s). This was the germ of something big. In the internet era, he worked out how to capture, convey and help people bet on market information. When he had made a really enormous sum of money — a value of about £1.2 billion at the height — he felt grateful to Britain, Mrs Thatcher, the Queen etc. So he started to give lots of money to charity, especially royal charity, and to the Conservatives. When I met him, we started chatting about politics and I asked him if he knew someone or other in that world. ‘Charles,’ he touchingly replied, ‘I don’t know no one.’ Quite possibly one of his motives in giving money was to meet people he admired, perhaps even to get an honour. What is wrong with that? Why shouldn’t he rise in the country which he loves and whose prosperity he has assisted? The feeling against people like Mr Cruddas is essentially snobbish. Now Tories are privately briefing that Mr Cruddas is a ‘barrow boy’ who is not much use at fund-raising. What bastards they can be.

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Obviously it was unwise of Mr Cruddas to say what he said to the spies from the Sunday Times but, if you think about it, why shouldn’t donors ‘buy access’ to the leaders of the party to which they donate? It is to the public good to support a political party as it is to support a charity, even if one does so with mixed motives.