Mandelson scandal proves it’s time to rewrite lobbying rules
Peter Mandelson, the Prince of Darkness, operated in the shadows. Only improved transparency around lobbying can prevent the next scandal, says Alastair McCarpra
Pete Brown’s book Clubland, on the history of Britain’s working men’s clubs, includes an account of early lobbying in Westminster. Faced with the potentially damaging 1902 Licensing Act, the Club & Institute Union (CIU) secured a more favourable outcome from MPs, having “spent its entire forty-year history making friends in high places”.
Brown notes that the CIU’s founder, the Reverend Henry Solly, believed firmly in “working from inside the system and getting powerful men onside”. That approach helped win a crucial victory, allowing clubs to continue selling alcohol.
Spending a career making friends in high places and getting powerful men onside is a decent description of Peter Mandelson’s political CV. Among the many sorry and serious details to come out of the latest Epstein files disclosures, much has been made of Mandelson’s alleged sharing of market-sensitive government information with Epstein while he was a minister, which is now being investigated.
The files also reveal how Mandelson was in regular contact with Epstein to discuss Global Counsel – the lobbying firm he co-founded – and its commercial activities. As a result, questions have been asked about Global Counsel and, in particular, its client Palantir. According to The Guardian, Palantir has UK government contracts worth more than £500m, some of which were awarded, it is alleged, without going through a competitive tender process. Prior to one of these contracts being awarded by the ministry of defence, we know that Mandelson helped set up a meeting between the Prime Minister and Palantir’s chief executive. Campaigners are calling for full public transparency.
Palantir in the spotlight
Westminster does have a lobbying transparency regime, not that it does much good. It is managed by the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists (ORCL) and Global Counsel are registered with them. Palantir is named as one of their clients. So why are groups like the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) calling for even greater transparency?
The information provided in the previous paragraph – that Global Counsel are registered on ORCL and Palantir is a client – is all that is required of them. Not what they are lobbying about, who they lobbied, when they engaged in lobbying, and who was doing the lobbying.
Global Counsel is one of, at the time of writing, 283 entities registered on ORCL. This is, by some measure, the lowest when compared with international counterparts, including Scotland and Ireland.
This is because the Westminster register only requires consultant lobbyists – those who are paid to lobby on someone else’s behalf – to register when they lobby only a minister or permanent secretary. Anyone lobbying when employed by a business – as David Cameron was when he lobbied on behalf of his employer, Greensill – cannot register.
This creates an iceberg-like situation where estimates say up to just four per cent of lobbying activity in Westminster is captured. It is quite simply a system not fit for purpose.
Stories that do get reported tend to take the form of a scandal thanks to the investigative work of journalists or, in the case of Mandelson, information from declassified documents from abroad. The rest is largely invisible to the public which only serves to create a vacuum that doesn’t require too much creativity to fill.
To date, the response to each controversy is, at best, a minor tweaking of the rules despite previous commitments to explore meaningful change. The outcome is predictably fading headlines until the next scandal arrives. If we want fewer scandals, we need stronger regulation.
We live in an age of information. Reverend Solly’s long-term lobbying efforts may have delivered a sensible outcome in their time, but such opaque approaches serve only to deepen public distrust today. Until the law meets that standard, trust in politics and the businesses that have a responsibility to engage with it, will continue to erode.
Alastair McCapra is CEO of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations