Dark Arts Dispatch: New lobbyist in town, a wind-powered party and FOI fears

Welcome back. 

Dark Arts was in Parliament on Tuesday evening, discussing with a very seasoned hack the current state of play. The hack observed that in his decades spent covering politics, the one trend that has held constant is the increasing proximity between big business, the corporate world and Westminster – a trend he felt had been imported largely from the US, and that he fears is now irreversible. His words were still ringing in my ears later that night, as news came through of Donald Trump’s likely victory, his campaign having been bolstered by the US oligarch class. 

So a cheerful night, all in all. 

Tough Anacta follow 

If there’s one thing UK politics needs, it’s another corporate lobbying company. Luckily a new outfit, referred to in The Times as the “first Starmerite lobbying firm” (that’s gotta sting, Arden Strategies), has launched after months of whispers about a new kid on the block with close ties to the Labour leadership. Though officially unveiled last week, Anacta Strategies UK Limited was incorporated in May 2023, suggesting it has been in the works for at least 18 months. 

Anacta UK is the new arm of Australian firm Anacta Strategies, co-founded by former Australian Labor politician Evan Moorhead and David Nelson, an adviser and campaigner with strong ties to that party. The Australian firm’s client list is varied, though it has several major private healthcare companies on its books, as well as TikTok Australia, natural resources giant Glencore and a handful of asset management companies focused on energy. 

Nelson had attracted some press interest in the UK due to his role supporting Keir Starmer’s team in the year or so leading up to the election and during the campaign itself. He is said to have worked very closely with Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s top adviser, and Pat McFadden, Cabinet Office minister and an influential member of Starmer’s top team. 

Anacta UK will be led by Teddy Ryan, a former Labour official who has held a few senior roles within the party in recent years, but in the months before leaving had been “focusing on expanding Labour’s commercial offer”, as he wrote on LinkedIn. This meant building on his work for the party’s business conference, which enabled Labour to raise millions through corporate sponsorship and flogging lobbyists exclusive access to senior party figures. So he should be well-prepared for the new role. 

Shonagh Munro joins Anacta UK from Arden Strategies, which was the lobbying shop deemed most plugged-in to the party, though this mantle could now be at risk with the launch of Anacta, as Munro’s departure would suggest. Announcing the move on LinkedIn, Munro wrote that the team “specialises in helping global businesses to fully understand how Labour governments operate across the UK, Australia and New Zealand” and is “made up of some truly fantastic individuals who have come from senior roles across government relations, comms and Labour HQ”. Responding to the post were well-wishers from Shell, Goldman Sachs and arms manufacturer Leonardo.

A head start in journalism

Dark Arts has previously discussed lobbying companies’ efforts to forge ties with journalists, as much of their work requires pushing their clients’ messages and talking points in the media. This might involve feeding a friendly journalist some ‘exclusive’ polling that supports a policy proposal a client wants to achieve, for example. Another benefit of keeping journos close might be a broader lack of coverage of the lobbying industry and its at times corrosive impact on democracy, but who’s to say? 

One firm in particular has sought to get in on the ground floor with the next generation of hacks by hosting an annual networking event for junior journalists. Cub reporters from the likes of The Telegraph, Sky News, City AM and the BBC were at Headland’s third event of this kind last month, where one of the firm’s directors, former BBC political correspondent Jonathan Blake, gave a talk. Writing on Linkedin, Headland thanked attendees, adding that it “look[s] forward to continuing to foster these valuable connections between PR [public relations] and journalists!” Valuable indeed.  

FOI watch

Labour entered government promising to restore trust in politics, in part by improving transparency through mechanisms such as Freedom of Information. The FOI Act allows members of the public and journalists to request information directly from public sector bodies, including government departments and councils. 

From Dark Arts’ vantage point, the party’s warm words on FOI are yet to translate into action. A number of relatively routine requests filed by Dark Arts have either been delayed extensively – including a request to the Treasury for details of a meeting between Starmer, Rachel Reeves and the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, which was filed back in August – or outright rejected, such as a request for copies of meeting invitations received by Reeves during her first few days in office.  

And it seems Dark Arts is not alone in facing obfuscation from the Treasury. FOI whizz George Greenwood of The Times has also had several requests blocked on what feels like highly spurious grounds. Public bodies can reject FOI requests where the cost of paying staff to find the information is too high, and they can treat separate requests for the same or similar information as a single request for cost purposes. But the Treasury has lumped together completely different requests from Greenwood, on subjects ranging from cryptocurrency to non-doms and sanctions, on the basis that they all involve the work of ministers and therefore collectively cost too much to answer. It has then blocked each of the requests. 

The upshot is that Greenwood has had to drop some of his inquiries in order to prioritise the most urgent requests. Not a bad result for the government, given Greenwood’s track record of producing striking scoops from his FOIs, but not exactly the kind of increased transparency Starmer and Co. promised. 

BVCA latest

Dark Arts has previously written about the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA), and its many ways of winning the support of MPs. One method at its disposal is ‘the MP Connect programme’, which involves the BVCA arranging for parliamentarians to go on site visits to businesses in their constituencies that are backed by private equity. Reeves and Angela Rayner have previously taken part in these visits. In the past few weeks, three more MPs have been on visits, including former Tory minister Damian Hinds and two new Labour MPs. One of the new MPs, Danny Beales, was so impressed by what he saw that he name-dropped the business, Allye Energy, in the Commons and asked energy minister Michael Shanks to meet with the firm. 

Wind Party 

Octopus Energy CEO Greg Jackson took to X last week to criticise an ‘exclusive’ news story in The Sun that cited polling carried out by Stonehaven which claimed to show voters think Starmer should scrap plans to ban gas boilers by 2025.

“Stonehaven aren’t pollsters,” he fumed, “they’re lobbyists being paid by the gas industry to prolong unhealthy, dirty, climate-destroying boilers.”

In Dark Arts’ view, Jackson was dead right to criticise this story. Stonehaven is indeed a lobbying company, registered with both the Public Relations and Communications Agency and the Office for the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists, and therefore publishes a list of its clients. This list has included SGN, the major gas distributor, and energy company EDF. The polling also found huge support for nuclear, fortuitously for another Stonehaven client, Sizewell C - EDF’s huge nuclear project in Suffolk. None of this appeared in the Sun’s report, obviously. 

On Monday evening, Jackson attended an event in Hackney, east London, co-hosted by Octopus Energy and campaign group Britain Remade, which also featured net zero secretary Ed Miliband and a temporary 28-metre tall wind turbine that generated the event’s energy.

Dark Arts is told attendees were treated to free espresso martinis and chicken nuggets, and the event went off without any major hiccups, besides some light heckling from residents angry at the installation of a massive wind turbine on their street. The wind on the night was also sufficient so as to avoid having to use the backup diesel generator that was on hand. That would have been embarrassing.  

This event wasn’t the first collab between Octopus and Britain Remade. A major report by the campaign group was launched at Octopus’s HQ in March last year, with both Jackson and Miliband in attendance, though no temporary wind turbines were erected that time. 

Britain Remade is essentially a front group set up by a lobbying company to advocate for policies favoured by its clients.The lobbying company in question? None other than Stonehaven. Though Britain Remade is not ostensibly directly involved with its lobbyist founder any more, Dark Arts has it on good authority that the firm still plays a part in its running, and was directly involved in organising Monday’s event featuring Jackson, including sending out the invitations.  

Lobbyists often set up campaign groups on behalf of clients that then advocate for policies beneficial to these clients or their wider industry. Without any obvious direct financial interest in the subject these groups seem more impartial and therefore trustworthy. So it isn’t immediately evident to someone who reads one of their reports, or sees one of their spokespeople on TV discussing policy, that Britain Remade was established by a lobbying firm on behalf of a paying client. That lack of transparency feels like more a feature than a bug of this approach. 

Establishing front groups in effect allows lobbyists to shroud their influence in a conversation or policy debate, or that of their clients. It is just another tool available, not unlike feeding stories to newspapers that won’t reveal the true nature of where the information is coming from, and who it may be designed to benefit. 

Incidentally, Britain Remade is funded by the Quadrature Climate Foundation, the climate charity arm of Quadrature Capital – a hedge fund that openDemocracy revealed had donated £4m to Labour in the run-up to the election – and a former client of Stonehaven. Small world. 

Ha-Neville Communications

Sky Sports pundit and former Manchester United Star Gary Neville has long been rumoured to fancy a go at politics, with bookies previously offering decent odds on the retired full-back standing for Labour at the last general election. That didn’t materialise, but Neville’s interest in politics doesn’t seem to have waned. 

Last week he found himself addressing a room of lobbyists and their clients at the HQ of Hanover Communications, a public affairs firm with a dedicated sports arm that recently hired former Conservative culture minister Dame Tracey Crouch. Crouch headed the previous government’s work on the fan-led football review and its proposal for an independent regulator, which has been the subject of fierce lobbying in recent times. 

If he does still have eyes on a Westminster seat, Neville could pick worse firms to associate with. Hanover had Polly Billington on their books until the election, when she won the seat of East Thanet for Labour. 

Committee selections 

Now that basically all the seats have been filled, departmental select committees can get started on inquiry work.

Select committee members are key targets for lobbyists to engage with, and right now consultants will be reaching out to everyone from the committee chairs to the apolitical House of Commons staff who help administer the committees’ work, to try and get an in for their clients. Getting a member of staff or one of their clients to feature in an inquiry session – where MPs quiz experts on the subject matter being investigated – is seen as a major win for a lobbying company. 

Lobbyists are also among the different types of organisations that are invited to come in and effectively pitch inquiry ideas to certain select committees — indeed, there were several among the dozens of attendees at the stakeholder event for the Energy Security and Net Zero select committee this week. 

Elsewhere, the highly influential Treasury select committee got underway this week with a series of sessions on Reeves’ budget. Reeves herself faced off with the committee on Wednesday, flanked by senior civil servants, but not before a panel of experts put forward their views the day before. Alongside the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Paul Johnson and the Resolution Foundation’s Mike Brewer, was Yael Selfin, chief economist at big four consultancy KPMG, and Andy King, of the lobbying firm Flint Global, which “advises international businesses and investors on policy, politics, regulation and competition”. 

Incidentally, last month Flint Global hired James Purnell as its new CEO. Purnell has recently worked in senior roles at the BBC and prior to that Boston Consulting Group, but it is likely his political CV that first attracted his new employers to him. Purnell served as an adviser in Tony Blair's Number 10 policy unit until he was elected as a Labour MP in 2001, and went on to be a secretary of state in two government departments before standing down as an MP in 2010.

Windfall 

One of the companies whose investment in the UK the government was keen to trumpet following the investment summit last month was Orsted, a Danish state-owned renewables company that operates a number of major offshore wind farms in the UK and has won numerous government contracts. 

Last week, it was announced that Orsted had sold a 12.5% stake in four of its turbine fields to one of the world’s biggest asset management firms Brookfield Asset Management (BAM), which is chaired by former Bank of England governor Mark Carney. As it happens, Carney is also a key member of Labour’s National Wealth Fund Taskforce, which is advising the government on how and where to spend billions of public money to bolster private investment on green energy projects.