Sensemaker: Access capitalism

• Australian army personnel began enforcing stay-at-home rules imposed in Sydney to curb a Covid Delta outbreak.
• The UK’s foreign secretary blamed Iran for an attack on an oil tanker off Oman last week that left two people, including a British citizen, dead.
• The Czech and Polish governments offered visas to Krystina Tsimanouskaya, the Belarusian athlete who refused to board a plane home from the Tokyo Olympics (more below).

What do Prince Charles, Ben Elliot and the UK’s Conservative Party have in common? An apparently urgent and continuing need for money. What does Mohamed Amersi have? Plenty of it. They are all now joined in a sleaze tangle that the Tories insist involves no conflicts of interest. It would be astonishing if this were true. 

For those who were concentrating on the Olympics (or the rugby, or an extraordinary Hungarian Grand Prix) over the weekend, here is an update on money and elites in Boris Johnson’s Britain:

The key claims are…

• that an “Advisory Board” of wealthy donors to the Conservative party, many of whom have given at least £250,000, get regular in-person access to Johnson and his chancellor, Rishi Sunak;
• that these donors tend to be Thatcherites unhappy about the high-spending tendencies of Johnson’s government, and who use their access to extol the benefits of slimmed-down states and low corporation tax;
• that Elliot, in his role as co-chair of the Tory party, was instrumental in setting up the board;
• that Elliot, in his other role as founder of the concierge firm Quintessentially, arranged for Amersi, a telecoms multi-millionaire, to be invited to a long candlelit dinner with his (Elliot’s) uncle, the Prince of Wales;
• that Amersi, who earned millions from telecoms deals in Russia in the 2000s, may have manoeuvred to influence policy by setting up a group to handle Conservative relations with the Middle East.

Says who? The bulk of the reporting has been done by the FT (£), but the Sunday Times (£) piled in at the weekend with an interview with Amersi in which he lamented the rise of “access capitalism” despite apparently being a beneficiary of it.

What’s his beef? Amersi is angry with two former Tory MPs, Charlotte Leslie and Sir Nicholas Soames, for raising questions about his appropriateness for the Middle East project. Amersi reportedly earned $4 million from a 2005 deal with a Russian firm controlled by a close associate of Vladimir Putin’s. He and his Russian partner have donated £750,000 to the Conservatives since 2017 and plan to go on giving. (To note: Amersi says Johnson approved his Middle East idea before becoming prime minister.)

So what? Fair question. There’s nothing new about Tory donors bending the ears of Tory ministers with predictably self-serving policy ideas. And the connection Elliot provided to Prince Charles is a story with legs only for those who thought the royals and their relatives were somehow insulated from mixed motives and questionable money. 

But the extent of the access cash can buy to the most senior levels of government does matter. Policy is supposed to be made by elected officials. They can deny all they want that donors have influence, but the Amersi story is, if nothing else, a reminder that that’s not how the donors see it.

Back to Belorussia – not
The International Olympic Committee says the Belarusian sprinter Krystina Tsimanouskaya is “safe and secure” in a Tokyo airport hotel after refusing to obey an order from her head coach to get on a flight home before she’d even run her heats. She’d better be. The Czech and Polish governments have offered her visas, and reports say she’s taking up the Polish offer. But an airport hotel is a perilous place to be for someone in her position. She will be worrying about her family back home and Belarusian officials know it. As a reminder, they have arrested tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters since last year’s rigged presidential election. The country’s Olympic Committee said Tsimanouskaya had been ordered home on doctors’ advice because of her “emotional, psychological state”. The truth seems to be that she complained about her coaches on social media and noted some of her fellow athletes had been ruled ineligible to compete because they hadn’t been tested enough for doping. Reuters broke the story, but this one will run and run.

Coal-powered solar
Trust the crusty WSJ to pour a little cold water ($) on the heartwarming story of the global boom in solar power. The paper reports that three quarters of the world’s supply of polysilicon, an essential component of most solar panels, is made in China using an energy-intensive process still largely reliant on coal. One big Chinese producer uses a lot of renewables but its two main rivals don’t. Despite this there should be a net cut in carbon emissions over the life of a typical panel, but it could be 30 or 40 years before we’re sure, according to Robbie Andrew of the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo. This is awkward, because the tumbling cost of Chinese panels is the main reason solar is taking off. Note to COP26: please add decarbonising Chinese solar panel production to your to-do list.

British boosters
The UK is planning to give 32 million booster Covid vaccinations to people who’ve already had two of them, while most people in poor countries still haven’t had their first. The Telegraph says MPs have been told the booster scheme will start next month and may be co-administered with the seasonal flu jab programme. Subject to approval from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, older adults and immuno-compromised people will be invited to get a shot in each arm. Eleven countries have started giving third doses or are considering it, and the World Health Organization has calculated that if they all give boosters to everyone over 50 it will deprive the global supply of 440 million doses that could go to the unvaccinated.

Greenland melts
Enough ice melted in Greenland last Tuesday to cover Florida in two inches of water. This is a terrific piece of verbal data-viz. It’s also terrible news. As the Guardian reported, data from Denmark’s Polar Portal website showed that the Greenland ice sheet lost 8.5 billion tonnes of ice on that one day and another 8.4 billion two days later as a high pressure system stuck over the region pushed temperatures to a record 19.8 degrees C. That is not nearly as high as some regions of Siberia have been experiencing, but in the melting business anything above zero counts. If the whole Greenland ice sheet were to melt, global sea levels would rise by six metres. In Florida, tiny increases are already pushing up waterfront property insurance premiums.

Broxbourne studios
It’s great news that Sunset Studios has bought 91 acres of Hertfordshire for £120 million and plans to build a film studio there. It will be even better if the investment brings £300 million a year and 4,500 jobs to the local economy, as the BBC quotes the people behind it saying it will. But Sunset who? The company is a studio-for-hire specialist, not a studio per se. It claims to have hosted production for La La Land, Zoolander and When Harry Met Sally but was not a production company for any of those films. Any investment in the UK creative sector is welcome, especially after the devastation wrought by Covid. But let’s not kid ourselves or get too carried away by press releases. At Pinewood, Elstree, Teddington and perhaps now Broxbourne people shoot great films and TV shows, but the financial muscle and most of the creative decision-making is still ten hours away by plane. In La La Land.

The track cycling kicked off at the Izu velodrome in Tokyo today, following the BMX, mountain biking and road racing last week. Track cycling has been a part of every summer games since 1896, the first modern Olympics. At that games, France’s Paul Masson won three golds – and in fact, France leads the all-time medal table for cycling at the Olympics, with 41 golds. Women’s track cycling only started in Seoul 1988 – the BMX freestyle, for both men and women, made its debut in Tokyo. In fact, it was London 2012 that saw every cycling discipline held for both men and women, well ahead of many other sports.

UK:
02/08 – quarantine-free entry to UK begins for US/EU vaccinated travellers; inquest begins into death of the perpetrator of Streatham terror attack; National Institute for Economic and Social Research publishes quarterly forecast for UK economy, 03/08 – ONS releases 2020 stats on drug deaths in England and Wales; Reclaim These Streets holds vigil for murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, 04/08 – High Court hears libel claim brought by Rebekah Vardy against Coleen Rooney; ten years since Mark Duggan was shot dead by police, 05/08 – review of England travel restrictions due; Office for National Statistics publishes data on prevalence of long Covid, 06/08 – ten years since London riots began; man appears in court charged with racially abusing retired footballer Rio Ferdinand

World:
02/08 – Israeli Supreme Court hearing over Sheikh Jarrah evictions in East Jerusalem, 03/08 – Boeing Starliner unmanned test flight to International Space Station; Oxfam releases report on feasibility of 2050 net zero targets, 04/08 – one year since Beirut explosion; former US vice president, Mike Pence, speaks at National Conservative Student Conference, 05/08 – inauguration of new Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, 06/08 – 30 years since launch of world’s first website; US Senate adjourns for August recess; world’s largest gathering of twins begins in Twinsburg, Ohio, 07/08 – pro-democracy protests planned against Thailand’s prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha

Thanks for reading, and please share this around.

Giles Whittell
@GWhittell

Xavier Greenwood
@XAMGreenwood

P.S. Friday’s Sensemaker had an error. We described the French territory of Réunion as being in South America. It is, in fact, in the Indian Ocean near South Africa. Thanks to all our members who wrote in to correct us. If any of them would like to fund a Sensemaker holiday to help us improve our island geography, please let us know.

Photographs by Getty Images and Sky News