The Jockey Club

 On 24 June 2020, Rose Paterson was found dead in the woods near her home in Shropshire. Her death, originally treated as unexplained, was later ruled to have been at her own hands. This began a chain of events that eighteen months later sees the government her and her husband devoted the later part of her life supporting in complete freefall, mired in scandal after scandal, with questions now being posed as to the tenability of the position of the Prime Minister himself. And the largest of these scandals is one Mrs. Paterson was personally connected to, yet no journalist will touch it with a barge pole.

This is the Jockey Club.

Paterson was born into an aristocratic family. Her father was the 4th Viscount Ridley and her maternal grandfather was the 11th Earl of Scarborough. Both of these aristocrats had been involved with the Conservative party, with the 11th Earl of Scarborough serving as the MP for the now Labour stronghold of York. A common aristocratic hobby is of course horse racing, and after acting as a bookmaker to secondary school friends and, in her own words, making “quite a killing”, Paterson found herself as the chair of Aintree Racecourse in 2014, and became a board member of the prestigious Jockey Club in 2019.

The Jockey Club is the largest horse racing organisation in the United Kingdom; the company owns several racecourses in the United Kingdom, including Aintree and Newmarket. The club is responsible for putting on races at its 15 courses, including the famous Grand National. It is also responsible for seeking sponsorship for these races. Sponsorship will be important later.

Moving forward in time, when David Amess MP (Conservative, Southend West) was murdered by an Islamic extremist terrorist in October 2021, his fellow Conservative MPs quickly took to Parliament and social media, not to ask for better security for MPs or condemn extremist terrorism, but to demand an end to the “abuse” they get on social media. While MPs do receive a moderate amount of abuse on social media, it is clear that the motive of some of them was a little more ulterior, with genuine criticism being described as abusive by MPs on the receiving end of it. Indeed, in the aftermath of Amess’ death, Conservative commentators including Isabel Hardman and John Ashmore were describing the sharing of MPs voting records as “abusive”, presumably because the Conservatives have much worse voting records than Labour MPs, so it would be quite convenient to hide them. On 22nd October, David TC Davies MP (Conservative, Monmouth) showed a screenshot of a tweet sent to him that he considered to be abusive. The allegedly abusive tweet read “So @DavidTCDavies you voted yesterday to allow water companies to continue dumping RAW SEWAGE in our rivers. But you told Monmouth THIS was what was killing the Wye and the Usk, and not the effect of intensive farming or poultry units near water courses.” Things came to a head on 17th November when a twitter user claimed that a friend of his had fielded a similar polite question to their local MP on social media, and their local MP had contacted his boss to try to have him fired for being abusive. Not much more is known about this allegation, as it seems to have been kept quiet for legal reasons - but the allegation did receive nearly 7,000 likes.

I choose to start here, with the tragic death of David Amess and its aftermath, because it was the first of three important missteps that deviate from prevailing public opinion that this government has made. Most people do not care for what happens on twitter, most people think that it is not abusive to politely question MPs on policy decisions, and most people think that using your friend’s tragic death in a terrorist incident to try to silence political oppositon is an utterly heinous thing to do. But, with friends like these, it would naturally not be the government’s last misstep.

Viewers of television over the Christmas period so far will likely have seen new advertisements for COVID-19 tests offered by a company called Randox - tests designed for holidaymakers looking to pass negative test requirements to get away over the Christmas break. But Randox did not start in offering these private tests - indeed Randox has been responsible for a large portion of the PCR testing on behalf of the government, including on behalf of the Test and Trace scheme. How did Randox get awarded this contract? Well…

Owen Paterson MP (Conservative, North Shropshire) first became involved in Randox in 2010 while Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Using his wife’s position at Aintree, he was subsequently able to lobby for Randox to be sponsors for the Grand National, making himself and his late wife very wealthy. His wife was of course none other than Jockey Club board member Rose Paterson. In 2020, Owen Paterson represented Randox again in a meeting with Lord James Bethel, who was responsible for handing out private sector contracts during the pandemic. For his efforts, Randox paid Paterson £8,333 per month. All of these connections of course made it very difficult for Paterson to argue that he had acted in the public interest as a member of Parliament when the contract was scrutinised in October 2021. Instead, the payments from Randox for him to get them government contracts would look like a bribe if they were not genuinely legal taxable income. Since it is apparently not technically illegal for MPs to take salaries from companies to represent the company in Parliament rather than their constituents, Paterson did not face any legal action, but instead faced a 30-day suspension from Parliament.

The government was reluctant to let the issue lie however - Boris Johnson ordered a vote not only on indefinitely postponing Paterson’s suspension, but also on an overhaul of the entire Parliamentary standards process, moving away from genuine scrutiny and more towards the government investigating itself. Many Conservative MPs were not inclined to vote for such obvious corruption, but the government insisted on a three-line whip on the vote, which passed with backing from the DUP. Even with the three-line whip, this did at the time cause the largest rebellion of Johnson’s tenure as Prime Minister, with 110 Conservative MPs not voting in line with the whip.

What happened next was the most rigorous examination yet of MPs’ second jobs by the press. It was revealed that so many Conservative MPs were taking just a few hours of work per month in exchange for tens of thousands of pounds per year. In particular, Geoffrey Cox MP (Conservative, Torridge and West Devon) had manipulated the virtual voting system for MPs at the height of first lockdown to conduct in-person work as a lawyer for companies committing tax avoidance in the Cayman Islands in exchange for a ludicrous sum of money. Conservative commentators tried to pin similar allegations on the Labour Party, but Nadia Whittome MP (Labour, Nottingham East) working in a care home during lockdown while also being an MP does not quite make her look as evil as someone doing legal representation for tax avoiders in the caribbean. Subsequently, a call to ban second jobs was rejected by MPs, with many, including Ed Davey MP (Liberal Democrat, Kingston and Surbiton), claiming that the £90,000 salary of an MP was simply too small for them to live on, particularly if they wanted their children to attend private school. This was the government’s second great misstep on public opinion, as most people were in fact outraged by some of the wealthiest in society taking to television to complain they did not have enough money to get by.

In the end, Owen Paterson resigned as an MP on 5th November 2021.

Perhaps there is a reason why the government did not want Paterson to be punished for taking his role with Randox. A sensible reason for the government to be concerned about it would be if they were all up to their necks in it. Take Dido Harding, for instance. She was appointed to be the head of NHS Test and Trace, which awarded contracts to Randox through Owen Paterson and Lord Bethel, perhaps because Harding is also on the board of the Jockey Club, and served there alongside Rose Paterson until Paterson’s death. Test and Trace awarded the lion’s share of its contracts to Serco, a company run by Rupert Soames, the brother of former MP Nicholas Soames and a grandson of Winston Churchill. It is unknown how much money the government actually awarded Serco - Test and Trace was given a budget of £37 billion over two years, it is believed that not all of that has been spent, and that some of it has been spent directly by the government rather than on contracting private companies, but a full breakdown of expenditure for Test and Trace has not yet been released, so it is impossible to determine for sure. It is, however, entirely plausible that Serco saw upwards of £10 billion of government money, which would be around 1.6% of all government expenditure for financial year 2020-2021. The government selects one MP to hold the position of “Anti-Corruption Champion”, whose job it is to watch out for deals being made through these connections rather than through normal channels. The current Anti-Corruption Champion is John Penrose MP (Conservative, Weston-Super-Mare), who is married to Dido Harding.

And at last the money can be followed all the way to Boris’ pandemic cabinet. Why would the Health Secretary turn a blind eye to such corruption under his watch? Well, Matt Hancock’s constituency is Newmarket, home to one of the most famous racecourses in Britain, so an awful lot of his constituency’s economy is driven by industry provided by the Jockey Club - so, with the Liberal Democrats angling to unseat him at the next general election, he has substantial incentive to keep the Jockey Club happy. Robert Jenrick MP (Conservative, Newark) is the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government. He also has some questions to answer about his relationship to the Jockey Club. Jenrick technically has ministerial powers to override planning permission decisions by local authorities, and has frequently done so to benefit his friends, sometimes to the tune of billions of pounds. In fact, he overstepped the mark so far with this power, that his decision to grant planning permission to pornography baron Richard Desmond was ruled unlawful in 2020. Also in 2020 he personally approved planning for the Jockey Club to build 318 homes in Sandown Park, Surrey against the wishes of the local council. Jenrick’s specific connection to the Jockey Club is unknown, but it is unlikely that he would have chosen to change the council’s decision at random in this manner.

It is worth noting more on the head of Test and Trace, Dido Harding. Her career of failure, while perhaps not strictly relevant to this blog post, calls into question her competency to run Test and Trace effectively. Before being appointed as CEO of TalkTalk in 2010, she worked in senior positions in several companies that are no longer with us, including the nation’s beloved Woolworths, and Thomas Cook, a company whose bankruptcy led to the largest peacetime repatriation of British citizens prior to the pandemic. Harding’s management of TalkTalk was a disaster, with the company gaining a reputation for offering low quality broadband on inflexible tariffs with enormous cancellation fees. Then in 2015 a cyber-attack orchestrated by a handful of teenagers brought down TalkTalk, with most of the company’s data being stolen. In an interview at the time, Harding admitted that she did not know many of the details of the attack, which led to her being called “ignorant” by the trade magazine Marketing. TalkTalk was fined £400,000 by the Information Commission for “failing to implement the most basic cyber security measures,” measures that other telecommunications giants had implemented while Harding was head of TalkTalk.

Having implicated the Spencer-Churchill family in an earlier paragraph, I will now implicate perhaps the only more aristocratic family than them in the United Kingdom. Viscount Ridley, Rose Paterson’s father, was the Lord Steward to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, a very senior position in the Royal Household. It is well-known that the Queen is rather taken with horses and has been her whole life, so it is not implausible that this love of horses might have influenced the Ridley family when Rose was young, leading to the connections between Boris Johnson’s government and the Jockey Club today.

The government’s third, perhaps fatal misstep was what moved the second jobs scandal out of the news. Rumours, followed by supporting images and videos, emerged of Boris Johnson and senior Conservative figures breaking lockdown restrictions to hold social events. Focus has been in particular on a party held on 18th December 2020, while most of the country was under strict Tier 2 and Tier 3 restrictions. The only person to have resigned so far over it has been Boris Johnson’s press secretary, Allegra Stratton, who, in her own words, “went home” rather than attended the party. And the fact that more heads have not rolled, and that the Prime Minister has quite clearly been implicated, have seen the Conservatives sink to new lows in the polls, with Labour now up to 8% ahead of them. In the by-election in North Shropshire to fill Owen Paterson’s seat, the Liberal Democrats overturned his 2019 majority of tens of thousands to take the seat on an enormous 34% swing. And it looks like the electoral woes for the Conservatives only get worse from here.

Perhaps that 30-day suspension would not have been so bad after all.