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Revealed: What goes on in No 10’s mass lobbying calls? [1]
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Date: 2025-06
What makes the UK an attractive investment destination in 2025?
“Stable government,” says investment minister Poppy Gustafsson. “The reality is we are going to have the same government for many years.”
Had the scores of corporate lobbyists dialling into the call not had their cameras automatically disabled, Gustafsson’s comment may have been met with an array of tiny, arched eyebrows.
The call – the first of two taking place today, on a sunny Tuesday in June – is the latest in a series of monthly webinars organised by No 10’s ‘partnerships unit’ to facilitate conversations between the government and corporate lobbyists.
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Leading the call is Baroness Gustafsson of Chesterton – as she is known since she was handed a life peerage to enable her to take on a ministerial role – the head of the Office for Investment, a governmental demi-department that falls under the remit of both the Treasury and the Department for Business and Trade.
The department, which Gustafsson was appointed to lead after a lobbyist pal of Peter Mandelson turned down the job, is in effect a kind of concierge service for the (largely foreign, largely US) investors who want to make money in the UK but require a little red carpet to be rolled out for them before they do so.
Its role, Gustafsson tells the lobbyists on the call, is “to have the view and perspective of the investor and champion that within government”. Because if there is one thing lacking from the UK’s political economy, it is the perspective and influence of big finance.
A few hours later, it is the turn of James Murray, junior Treasury minister, to lead the second mass-lobbying call, playing understudy after his senior colleague Darren Jones dropped out last minute. It is hard not to picture the devastated faces of a sea of policy wonks as the lineup change is announced.
Murray has the politician’s uncanny knack for hitting a pitch and frequency which registers in the brain as speech but is nonetheless completely unintelligible. It’s a common problem among ministers in this government, whose comms are sorely lacking, but Murray is among the worst offenders.
Still, using high-tech translation software, Dark Arts has been able to parse snippets of Murray’s spiel. This consisted largely of pitching future fiscal events as though they were the next season of a middling sitcom (“if you enjoyed the spending review, there’ll be more stuff coming out soon”) and searing analyses of the UK’s economic situation (“the way that I see it is that supporting growth right across the country is the question of saying, ‘We need growth in London and everywhere across the UK’”).
In truth, little of serious substance is said at these ostensibly open meetings; ministers talk around pre-vetted questions from the audience, with the level of insight provided varying from little to none, depending on the minister.
Lobbyists have previously complained that the calls are a waste of time. Dark Arts suspects that a decision to hide the list of attendees – the government seemingly learnt its lesson on inadvertent transparency after we reported that the interests of fossil fuel giants, major banks and big pharma were all represented at the first meeting six months ago – has the additional benefit of masking a downturn in attendance. It may well be that ministers are now struggling to pitch access to lobbyists.
The overall message of the calls remains crystal clear, though: less than a year in, this administration has run out of ideas and wants – or needs – big business to pitch in. On the first call back in January, Lord Livermore told lobbyists that they would play a “huge and important part” in the government's plans.
This is perhaps not what voters who backed Labour at the last election quite imagined when they ticked the box for the party of workers, but the warning signs were there all along. Jim Murphy, a former Scottish Labour leader and Blair-era minister-turned lobbyist, laid out the blueprint at a 2023 Labour Party Conference fringe event hosted by the Policy Exchange think tank, while sitting alongside yet another Blair-era minister-turned lobbyist, Ruth Kelly.
“The first private sector government in Labour’s history,” is how Murphy described it at the time, which feels like an increasingly accurate prediction. Though as a leading corporate access-merchant in the years leading up to the general election, Murphy had an active hand in the process he so accurately described, linking up senior party figures with executives from arms firms and fossil fuel companies, among others.
It is certainly a vision shared by many in No 10 – including the prime minister’s business adviser, Varun Chandra. Having spent years advocating the interests of big institutional investors to Conservative government ministers, Chandra now sits at the other end of the table, working within government alongside Labour ministers, largely to the same ends.
So perhaps Baroness Gustafsson was right when she said we will have the same government for many years. While the colour of the rosette, or the headings on the AI-generated investment deck, may change, the rights of multinational financial institutions to extract profits will always be held sacrosanct. Capital will always have a man in the room – or several hundred on the Teams call.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/government-call-lobbyists-no-10-poppy-gustafsson-james-murray-labour-desperation/
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