(Bloomberg) -- The top U.K. Treasury official offered David Cameron contact details for the deputy governor of the Bank of England, as the former prime minister tried to lobby on behalf of the now insolvent lender Greensill Capital.
Cameron had messaged Treasury Permanent Secretary Tom Scholar on March 5, 2020 requesting a number for Deputy Governor Jon Cunliffe’s number and offering to take Scholar out for lunch, according to texts that were published by the House of Commons Treasury Committee.
On Friday, the Treasury published Scholar’s replies to the texts, in response to a freedom of information request from Bloomberg.
“Great to hear from you. Here’s the Cunliffe number. +44 203 461 [EXCISED],” Scholar wrote. “Can also supply emails, mobile numbers, you name it.”
Though the Treasury said that at the time, Scholar didn’t know Cameron was seeking to lobby on behalf of Greensill, the friendly tone is likely to raise further questions about close ties between government officials and the company as it tried to access emergency Coronavirus lending programs.
While Cameron ultimately failed to persuade the Treasury to accede to Greensill’s requests, the intensity of his lobbying has put pressure on senior members of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government to explain whether they gave him special favors.
‘Pushed’
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak has also been pressured into publishing his responses to Cameron, including one in which he told the former premier he’d “pushed” his officials to consider helping Greensill.
In all, Cameron sent more than 70 emails and texts to different officials, including 23 text messages to Scholar. In its FOI response, the Treasury published 12 text messages sent to Cameron from Scholar.
Last month, the Treasury rejected Bloomberg’s request, saying Scholar’s replies to Cameron had been automatically deleted when his phone was reset after the wrong password was inputted.
But Bloomberg appealed on the grounds that as Cameron had published his own texts to Scholar, it was not unreasonable for Scholar to request Cameron release his own missives from his phone.
Interest Rates
Most of Scholar’s messages concern details of setting up meetings and status updates about the request from Greensill. But Friday’s release does clarify one mystery: In one text on March 6, 2020, Cameron had replied “never quite understood how rate cuts help a pandemic.”
That promoted speculation about whether Scholar had improperly disclosed information about a central bank interest rate decision that came a few days later. Treasury Committee member Harriett Baldwin asked Scholar about it in an evidence session on May 27, saying that “implies that what you had said to him covered the rate cut.”
Scholar replied that while he couldn’t remember what he’d written to prompt Cameron’s reply, “I can certainly assure you that I would not have disclosed anything to do with U.K. monetary policy, not least because, at that point in time, I was not in possession of any information.”
The response published Friday shows Scholar had written that he looked forward to seeing Cameron at a leaving event for former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney hosted by Sunak, “unless it gets Covid canceled, which seems quite likely, since the world’s central bankers are in [EXCISED WORD] mode.”
The Treasury paraphrased the excised word as “crisis.”
Cameron’s response raises questions about whether the excised text refers to rate-cutting. The Treasury declined to comment.
Scholar’s messages reveal he last encountered Greensill founder Lex Greensill in 2008. Another question answered by the publication of the texts is whether Scholar reciprocated the “Love Dc” sign-offs that Cameron wrote in a couple of texts. The closest Scholar came was to write “Tom.”
©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
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