THE millionaires who bankrolled the Labour and Tory election campaigns are to be elevated to the House of Lords, provoking a new favours-for-cash row,
The Times has learnt.
The forthcoming list of 28 working peers, which has been obtained by The Times, includes Sir David Garrard and Sir Gulam Noon, each of whom made donations of more than £200,000 to Labour. Sir David had previously dona-ted £70,000 to the Tory party when William Hague was the leader, to pay for a call centre at Conservative Central Office. The party was so grateful that it put up a plaque in his honour.
The property millionaire also attended a meeting in the autumn of 2003 for other potential donors with Michael Howard, shortly after he became leader of the Conservative Party.
The new Conservative peers, nominated by Mr Howard, include Robert Edmiston, who gave the party £250,000 last year, and the Tory treasurer Jona-than Marland, who gives £50,000 a year and leads its fundraising operation. The Labour nominations follow Mr Blair’s decision last year to give a peerage to Paul Drayson, a businessman who had already given £100,000 to Labour and who subsequently made a donation of £500,000. He has since been made a defence minister.
David Trimble, the former leader of the Ulster Unionist Party who lost his seat in the general election, is also awarded a peerage.
The Times disclosure also exposes an astounding row at the heart of the Green Party over its one nomination.
The list confirms the recent trend under which the financial supporters of major parties are being awarded seats in the Lords intended for working parliamentarians, with Labour implicated as much as the Conservatives.
It will confirm a belief increasingly taking hold in the Lords that an unofficial threshold of donations of about £250,000 is operated by the major parties when considering nominations for peerages.
The previous list of working peers, published in May last year, included four major donors to the Tory party nominated by Iain Duncan Smith: Irvine Laidlaw, Stanley Kalms, Leonard Steinberg and Greville Howard.
The list of new peers was attacked last night by Martin Bell, the former Independent MP for Tatton and anti-sleaze campaigner, who claimed that the system for appointing peers was more contaminated now than for 80 years.
Mr Bell told The Times: “The sale and purchase of peerages has reached a level, I would say, not known since the time of Lloyd George. This brings politics into disrepute. We have a huge problem of public trust in public life, all the more after last week. How can people trust their politicians?” The list, which Downing Street is expected to publish this month, will create eleven Labour peers, eight Conservatives, five Liberal Democrats and three Democratic Unionists and one Ulster Unionist Party peer.
The numbers will entrench Labour’s new-found position since May as the largest party in the Lords, giving it 221 peers to the Tories’ 216, although the presence of 192 cross-benchers means no party will have a majority. The Lib Dems will have a 79-strong group in the Lords.
Elsewhere in the list, Ian Paisley, the Democratic Unionist Party leader, has nominated his wife Eileen as one of his peers.
The list would have been larger but for a bizarre row within the Green Party, to which Downing Street offered a rare opportunity to nominate a name. This invitation, however, plunged the party into a feud. The Greens submitted the name of their chairman, Hugo Charlton. But it was rejected by Downing Street when it emerged that he had signed the nomination form himself, which is not permitted. The Greens eschew a formal leader, preferring two “principal speakers”, but the form was sent to him as the chairman is registered as the leader for legal purposes. A Green source told The Times that he did so without consultation and in defiance of an internal procedure under which members seeking a peerage should apply to a panel, undergo an interview and, if approved, stand in a members ballot. Mr Charlton was suspended as chairman and his nomination withdrawn by the Greens.
Labour’s peers include Sir Bill Morris, the former transport workers’ leader, two ex-MPs, Keith Bradley and Joyce Quin, plus Maggie Jones, a former member of the National Executive Committee who contested Blaenau Gwent but was defeated by an independent Labour candidate, Peter Law.
The Tories have nominated two Asian peers: Sandip Verma, who contested Wolverhampton South West in the election, and Mohammad Sheikh, a lawyer from Croydon.
Two ex-Lib Dem MPs are to become peers, John Burnett and Brian Cotter, plus former MEP Robin Teverson, and John Lee, a one-time Tory minister who defected to the Lib Dems four years ago.
Sir David came to the attention of Labour through his support for the Business Academy in Bexley, which was opened by Tony Blair in 2002. The millionaire was knighted in 2003 for charitable services and donated £200,000 to the Party in the same year.
The biggest donor in the Tory list is Robert Edmiston, who chairs the Midland Industrial Council, which gives the Tories a six-figure donation each year, rising closer to £500,000 in election year. Last year he gave £250,000 of his own money to the party.
Mr Edmiston, who imports cars from the Far East, is regularly in the top ten of charitable donors in Britain. In 2004 he gave £27 million to the charity Christian Vision.
