THE controversial tycoon Paul Drayson’s links to the Labour Party have caused problems for the Prime Minister before.
But the previous rows over the pharmaceutical millionaire were dwarfed yesterday by the news that Lord Drayson had poured half a million pounds into Labour’s coffers just weeks after being made a peer by Tony Blair.
His massive donation far outst
ripped previous sums he had given to the party, and has provoked demands for an overhaul of the system that risks giving wealthy individuals "disproportionate influence as a result of extraordinarily large donations".
Lord Drayson, who accepted a life peerage from the Prime Minister in May, has been a controversial figure since he made his company, PowderJect, millions of pounds through a disputed government contract.
He banked £32 million after securing the contract to supply smallpox vaccines in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
And before that deal, PowderJect won a government contract to supply TB vaccines, although ministers insisted there was no connection between the contracts and the £50,000 donation to Labour made by Lord Drayson while the government was deciding who should be given the contract.
An inquiry by the National Audit Office found no link between Lord Drayson’s gift and the initial contract.
The then health minister, Lord Hunt, was accused of misleading parliament by claiming the government had had no choice but to use PowderJect to get the smallpox supplies, even though Lord Drayson’s firm was merely acting as a middleman.
The peer told the Lords that ministers were unable to go directly to Bavarian Nordic, the vaccine’s manufacturer, because it had said it would deal only through Lord Drayson for contractual reasons.
But Asger Aamund, chairman of Bavarian Nordic, said he would have supplied the vaccine direct - cutting out Lord Drayson and saving taxpayers millions - but was never asked to do so. The National Audit Office criticised the handling of the deal but found no impropriety.
What was not disclosed at the time was that Lord Drayson was one of a select group of businessmen who met the Prime Minister at a private Downing Street breakfast in December 2001, shortly before his firm won the contract.
Figures released by the Electoral Commission yesterday showed that Lord Drayson made a donation in the second quarter of this year far in excess of his previous financial gifts.
He gave £505,000, a sum one-sixth the size of the £3 million total donation from Britain’s trades unions - traditionally Labour’s staunchest financial backers - in the second quarter of 2004.
But there is more to Lord Drayson’s relationship with Mr Blair than financial largesse. When the Prime Minister was under fire for refusing to reveal whether his baby son, Leo, had had the MMR vaccine, it was Lord Drayson who rode to his rescue, dismissing the criticism as "unfair". The 43-year-old former marketing manager of a confectionery company even publicly suggested that the BBC television soap opera EastEnders should include a storyline on the MMR vaccine to counter parents’ fears that it could be linked to autism.
It was this cosy relationship with Labour that prompted Lord Drayson, then just a common-or-garden "Mr", to sign a letter before the last general election along with five other leading industrialists, carried in the Financial Times, which endorsed the government’s record on promoting business.
The 2001 election victory in the bag, Mr Drayson went on to donate £100,000 in two separate £50,000 instalments to the Labour Party as it embarked on its second term in government.
That donation, as disclosed yesterday, is massively overshadowed by the money he poured into Labour’s coffers six weeks after being made a peer by Mr Blair.
There is more. Mr Blair named PowderJect’s flagship innovation - the needle-less injection - as a "millennium" product.
The latest claims of sleaze and cronyism to dog Labour come in the wake of several high- profile scandals involving big money donors.
Mr Blair’s "whiter-than-white" image was first dented shortly after the 1997 landslide general election when Labour was forced to hand back a £1 million donation from the racing tycoon Bernie Ecclestone after it was claimed it had influenced government policy on cigarette advertising in Formula One racing.
It was further tarnished when Labour accepted money from Richard Desmond, whose publishing empire included several top shelf pornographic magazines.
The Prime Minister was also forced to defend himself amid allegations he had intervened on behalf of the Labour donor Lakshmi Mittal when he tried to buy out the Romanian state steel industry.
And Mr Blair’s close political ally Peter Mandelson has not been able to shake off claims of cronyism.
He resigned after allegedly becoming embroiled in a plan to gain the super-rich Hinduja brothers British passports after they gave the government £1 million for the ill-starred Dome project.
The Liberal Democrats yesterday called for a cap on donations and the party’s campaigns director, Lord Rennard, said: "No one person should be able to exercise disproportionate influence as a result of extraordinarily large donations.
"In a democracy, millions of pounds should not be more important than millions of votes. There should be a cap on very large donations to all parties to avoid the suspicion that money is buying influence or favours."
Pete Wishart, the Scottish National Party’s chief whip at Westminster, said: "It is no surprise to us to learn that Labour is in the pocket of a few business cronies.
"There is a grubby pattern in previous Labour donations including the £1 million from Bernie Ecclestone and donations from Enron, Mittal and Richard Desmond."
The full article contains 973 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
