VICAR’S SON WHO LOVES THE HIGH LIFE
Friend of the rich and famous, he pours scorn on anyone who dares cross him
NO ONE is suggesting that Mr Gummer is corrupt,’ the newspaper editorial thundered. ‘But he has lamentably failed to grasp the point that the probity of a Government Minister must be above reproach and be seen to be above reproach if the seeds of corruption are not to be sown.’
It was December 1992, and John Selwyn Gummer, then the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, had been caught out having had the garden of his Suffolk mansion landscaped for free – partly at the expense of taxpayers, and partly as a gift from one of Britain’s biggest food companies, Hillsdown Holdings.
Under Whitehall’s ministerial code, members of the Cabinet are not supposed to accept gifts from commercial bodies at all, let alone from firms involved with their own departments. They must not, as the rulebook then in use put it, ‘ accept any gift which would, or might appear to, place him or her under any obligation’.
Vainly, Gummer protested that the work had been essential to spruce up his home, Winston Grange, near Debenham, for a meeting of European agriculture ministers, also attended by Prince Charles.
‘I did the job for the Government and for Britain’, Gummer said.
It didn’t satisfy his critics. ‘ We do not expect a large food producer to excavate and restore the Minister for Food’s garden pond,’ the editorial concluded. ‘He should pay the money back forthwith.’
As distant as this episode from John Major’s government is, it illustrates four connected themes which, long-time acquaintances say, have characterised Gummer’s long political career.
First is an enviable capacity to make the most of opportunities for enrichment presented through his public life. Second, a peculiar inability to appreciate how this can be seen by others. Third, an indelible sense of his own righteousness: a devout Catholic convert who left the Church of England when it decided to accept women as priests, Gummer tends to cast debate over policy as a struggle between sinners (his opponents) and a saint (himself) – nowadays, via his prolific Twitter feed.
And finally, despite getting into many scrapes, he has – so far – always survived them.
Gummer emerged from the row over his garden to be promoted to Environment Secretary, and then, in the years the Tories were in Opposition from 1997 to 2010, to a series of high-profile ‘green’ campaign posts, while simultaneously nurturing his family consulting business, Sancroft International. The company made a great deal of money advising businesses how to become more friendly to the environment, which happened to be the issue which Gummer cared about most passionately.
He even survived the parliamentary expenses scandal, despite being forced to pay back more than £10,000 after the disclosure he had claimed taxpayers’ money for tending those same Winston Grange gardens, including the employment of a mole-catcher.
(This week, this newspaper reveals a similar alleged insouciance towards paying his butler – whose cost, a report from Exeter Business School claims, was put through his company’s books, so saving him tax. Gummer denies this.)
After Mole-catcher-gate, a lesser man might have been finished.
Instead, now reincarnated as the peer Lord De ben, Gu mmer ascended effortlessly to the chairmanship of the government Committee on Climate Change (CCC), while Sancroft, as this newspaper reveals today, continued to turn over £1.2 million a year – some of it from firms with a huge financial interest in the work of the CCC.
Now 79, Gummer is the son of a Stockport vicar. His brother, Peter, now Lord Chadlington, founded Shandwicks, the giant PR firm, and is a close friend of David Cameron – the Prime Minister who in 2012 appointed John to the CCC.
Gummer joined the Tory Party when he was 17, and at Cambridge led both the Conservative Association and the Cambridge Union. There he forged lasting political bonds. A photo of the wedding of arch- Europhile Kenneth Clarke was once said to hang in Gummer’s bathroom: he was best man and among the ushers were the later Home Secretaries Michael Howard and Leon Brittan.
The former Chancellor Norman Lamont was also close.
Having first been elected to the Suffolk constituency that includes Winston Grange in 1970, his knack for picking political winners persisted. When Major – who was seen as a rank outsider – ran for the
party leadership in 1990, it was Gummer who signed his nomination papers. His openly vaunted piety – his brother once said that at 1960s Cambridge, Gummer ‘took a terribly firm, biblical view’ on premarital sex, ‘which was extremely unpopular’ – did not stop him from living the high life.
Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of Gummer’s best friends. Another is Stephen Fry, and for a time, he drove a Lotus sports car.
Later, after he became a Minister, official drivers reportedly grumbled at having to wait for him until the small hours outside Annabel’s nightclub in London.
He might have been revelling, but needless to say, he has always been devoted to Edward Heath’s former secretary, Penny, whom he married in 1977. She is the mother of his four children and fellow Sancroft shareholders. On their bed, he once revealed, they had his and her pillows: one printed with the legend ‘sex, sex, sex,’ the other reading ‘yes, yes, yes’.
Perhaps it is Gummer’s faith which gives him his sense of certainty and moral superiority.
In any event, as his tweets demonstrate almost daily, his standard method of argument is to denigrate the worth and intelligence of those who disagree with him. Recently, most of the vicious, personal attacks mounted by this supposedly godly man have been directed against those who support Brexit. Brexiteers, he announced on Friday, ‘rely on prejudice, other people’s comments, gut i nstincts, popular misconceptions, The Sun – anything except proper research, reading documents, and listening to evidence.’
Doubtless, the fact that he claims payments for the land around Winston Grange under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy plays no part in his calculations.
But his venom – poured on occasion on individual Conservative MPs – is remarkable, especially for someone who heads a supposedly irreproachable quango. For exam- ple, also on Friday, he tweeted that Mid-Bedfordshire MP Nadine Dorries ‘doesn’t appear to have any strong links with reality yet she suggests we should prefer her opinions over those of almost every major business leader, economist, and environmentalist.’
A few days earlier, he said that Daniel Kawczynski, the MP for Shrewsbury and Atcham, was simply ‘a disgrace’.
Similarly, when Gummer expounds on global warming, his inner conviction that he is doing the Lord’s work shines through. Those who disagree that catastrophe is imminent, or that the policies supported by the CCC might not be ideal, are, in Gummer’s view, to be reviled, cast out – and must, he insists, be motivated by Mammon.
Again and again, he has tweeted that so- called ‘ dismissers and deniers’ are in the pay of fossil fuel companies, and has frequently compared them to advocates paid by tobacco companies to deny there was a link between smoking and lung cancer.
A typical example came on January 23: ‘Vested interests are very powerful but they can be overcome by the determination of millions who care about their children and grandchildren and refuse to give up till we have repaired the world that we have so gravely injured.’
In light of today’s disclosure by this newspaper that in fact, it is Gummer’s family company which has been in the pay of commercial bodies with an interest in the causes he promotes, statements like that acquire an unintended irony.
But what is almost certain is that he will never admit he was wrong.
‘It isn’t in his nature,’ says one associate, citing the recent case where the BBC had to issue an apology after Gummer falsely claimed on the Today programme that the Government had introduced a ban on building new onshore windfarms.
It took months to resolve the ensuing complaint – with Gummer constantly insisting he had been right, despite the evidence that, even as he spoke, huge new onshore windfarm projects were under way in Scotland.
Whether he survives this latest scandal remains to be seen. With MPs and peers calling for an inquiry, the Gummer gravy train may finally hit the buffers. But it would not be wise to bet on it.
His standard way of dealing with critics is to denigrate them