To see how easy it is for the wealthy to buy political access and influence, consider the story of the Tory donor Mohamed Amersi.

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    Born to a trading family in Kenya in 1960, three years before independence from Britain, Amersi attended Merchant Taylors’, a private school in Hertfordshire, before studying medicine and law at Sheffield University then at Cambridge.

    It is Gove, a clever and gawky former journalist serving as David Cameron’s chief whip, to whom Amersi has the pleasure of listening during an intimate fundraiser in a 5 Hertford Street dining room in 2015.

    He’s a non-dom – a tax status available to wealthy UK residents who say their main home is elsewhere and so pay fewer dues in Britain – and after all these years based in Dubai, Amersi’s not on the British electoral roll.

    Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ Australian election guru, has a shopping list for the final week: £500,000 for Facebook videos, more for ads that wrap over the front pages of newspapers.

    But at a lunchtime auction held by a Conservative organisation in May 2022, Amersi gives another £16,000 for the Thatcher Package (commemorative plate, autographed bottle of whisky, tea with two of the late Margaret’s colleagues) and dinner at a Green Park mansion with “four guests from the Westminster political scene”.

    And Amersi is suing the BBC, over a Panorama documentary examining his role – minimal and unwitting, he says – in a TeliaSonera telecoms deal that the company later admitted involved bribing an Uzbek dictator’s daughter.


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