Reading Time: 12 minutes

THE FACE OF S4C’S SENEDD ELECTION COVERAGE WORKS FOR A POLITICAL LOBBYING FIRM WITH CLOSE TIES TO THE TORY GOVERNMENT.

GUTO HARRI WAS BORIS JOHNSON’S MAIN SPOKESPERSON WHEN THE NOW PM WAS LONDON MAYOR, AND THE TWO HAVE REMAINED CLOSE SINCE.

HARRI IS ALSO A DIRECTOR OF A WELSH COMPANY THAT HAS LUCRATIVE CONTRACTS IN MIDDLE EASTERN COUNTRIES WITH APPALLING HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES, INCLUDING SAUDI ARABIA. ONE OF THE CONTRACTS – WORTH £150 MILLION – WAS SIGNED IN 10 DOWNING STREET AND HAS THE PRIME MINISTER’S PERSONAL ENDORSEMENT.

THE FIRM, HYDRO INDUSTRIES LIMITED, LAST YEAR GAINED ACCESS TO MULTI-MILLION POUND GOVERNMENT COVID LOANS, IN A CASE THAT DRAWS COMPARISONS WITH DAVID CAMERON’S PURSUIT OF TAXPAYER-FUNDED LOANS FOR THE FAILED FINANCIAL SERVICES COMPANY GREENSILL CAPITAL.

By Marc Edwards, Investigative Journalist*

The stink caused by Boris Johnson’s luxury flat refurbishment and the lobbying scandal surrounding former Prime Minister David Cameron, working for collapsed finance firm Greensill Capital, have shone a light into the murky world of wealth and power within the UK Government and the Conservative Party. 

Johnson is desperate to play down allegations of corruption and we have yet to see whether his disgruntled former advisor Dominic Cummings has the evidence to back up his explosive claims against the PM. 

Cameron too denies wrong-doing. It’s likely that he has exploited enough loopholes to make his actions strictly legal. But despite his attempts to clear the air, Cameron’s actions – in badgering senior Ministers to hand Greensill access to government-backed Covid financial aid schemes – tell a story that’s bigger than Tory sleaze. 

The ex-PM reportedly told friends he stood to gain a windfall of tens of millions of pounds if Greensill floated on the stock exchange.

Even before the current scandal broke, Cameron was on shaky moral ground. In January 2020, a little over a year after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he went on a lobbying trip to Saudi Arabia to meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who stands accused by the US and others of ordering the brutal killing. Cameron insists he took the opportunity to raise “human rights issues”.

But Cameron’s behaviour is seen as particularly brazen, given his warning in 2010 that a crisis over lobbying was the “next big scandal waiting to happen”. 

Just before he became PM Cameron said: “We all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way.”

“Ex-advisers for hire”, as Cameron himself put it, don’t just operate in Westminster. Guto Harri, the TV presenter and face of S4C’s Senedd Election coverage, has carved out a lucrative business career in Wales and London, as a director of a fast-growing Welsh-based company and as a senior advisor to leading lobbying firms.

Harri was Boris Johnson’s spokesman when Johnson was Mayor of London. Now, in addition to fronting his own politics show on S4C, he has a parallel career as a public-speaker, spin-doctor and lobbyist, working closely with right-leaning politicians and Conservative Party allies. He is also a businessman who, like David Cameron, stands to gain from big money deals involving authoritarian, western-backed regimes. 

One of these deals even has the public backing of Boris Johnson himself, raising more questions about the privileged access afforded to close associates of the Prime Minister. 

Since 2018, Harri has been a director of a Welsh-based company, Hydro Industries Limited, a “smart water solutions” enterprise that last year won a big contract with Saudi Arabia to treat industrial sludge. The value of the initial deal has not been disclosed, but it reportedly runs into hundreds of thousands of pounds and, with potential additional sites, could be worth millions. Hydro Industries is not forthcoming about the deal’s true value. 

However, the contract was won following the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between Hydro Industries and the Saudi Arabia Government Investment Authority (SAGIA). And Hydro says it plans to compete for further work as it grows its business and brand within the kingdom.

And in March 2020 Hydro announced it had won another contract, this time worth £150 million, to build a water treatment plant for an oil terminal on Egypt’s Red Sea Coast.

The contract is with Egypt’s East Gas Company, that runs a large industrial plant near the tourist resort and world-renowned diving destination of Hurghada. The firm exploits gas and oil and wants to treat the effluents that its plants discharge into the sea. 

The agreement was signed in 10 Downing Street and was heartily endorsed by Harri’s former boss, Prime Minister Boris Johnson. “This is exactly the type of contract in the post-Brexit era that showcases the best of UK industry,” the PM said.

Harri and other Hydro Industries executives met the Prime Minister at 10  Downing Street on February 27th last year at a St David’s Day reception, just days before the company announced the £150 million Egypt contract. 

The party included Hydro CEO Wayne Preece and company Chairman David Pickering, a former Wales rugby captain and ex-Chairman of the Welsh Rugby Union.  Pictured in the Tweet below are Guto Harri, left; CEO Wayne Preece, 2nd left; Chairman David Pickering, back right 

Hydro CEO Wayne Preece hailed the Egyptian deal as a big win for the company and a foot in the door to a market valued at over £10 billion per year. 

“Hydro’s developing relationship with UK Export Finance will enable us to capitalise on our major breakthrough in this sector, further enhancing our British and global brand,” he said.

UK Export Finance is the British Government’s export credit agency, overseen by the Secretary of State for International Trade, Liz Truss. It helps UK companies to export goods and services and invest overseas by underwriting long-term loans. Today its maximum commitment stands at £50bn. 

With such big money at stake, no wonder Hydro is keen to position itself near the front of the queue for Government loans on favourable terms. The question is what role Guto Harri’s close personal relationship with Boris Johnson might play when it comes to winning highly lucrative contracts. 

And UK Export Finance is not the only pot of taxpayers’ money the firm is competing for. It is also angling for contracts that tap into the Government’s multi-billion pound foreign aid budget. In 2018 CEO Wayne Preece joined Prime Minister Theresa May on a British trade mission to Africa to boost trade and investment with developing countries. He said Hydro wanted to identify opportunities to deploy the firm’s “transformative” water treatment technology to change the lives of some of the most disadvantaged people in the world, and to do so with the “financial clout of the UK Government”. And a contract promising a big slice of public money is certainly a prize worth winning – in 2019 UK Government Overseas Development Assistance totalled more than £15 billion, financial clout indeed. 

We asked Guto Harri how many meetings Hydro Industries Limited has had with Government Ministers or senior Government officials since 2018. He declined to answer any of our specific questions.

Hydro’s strategy of seeking privileged access to the corridors of power seems to be working. The company, headquartered in Llangennech, Carmarthenshire, has grown impressively since 2018, the year Guto Harri joined the board. Between 2019 and 2020 the firm’s net assets grew threefold from £4 million to £12.5 million. As for cash in the bank, this grew 33-fold from just over £175,000 in 2019 to £5.8 million in 2020. However, in 2017, before the former spokesperson for Boris Johnson joined the board, Hydro Industries had made a loss of £3m.

The bounce in the fortunes of Hydro Industries doesn’t end there. Just as Greensill Capital, with the help of its well-connected employee, David Cameron, was able to access Government-backed Covid financial aid, Hydro Industries has also dipped into the UK Treasury’s pandemic pot. In Greensill’s case, the firm was allowed to apply for loans of up to £50 million under the Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS).

Hydro gained access to a more modest scheme, the Coronavirus Future Fund (CFF), which still allowed it to access Government-backed loans of up to £5 million, known as Convertible Loan Agreements (CLAs). Any money borrowed had to be match-funded 50:50 by private investors. Hydro’s accounts show that in July 2020 the total value of the loan arrangement through the Coronavirus Future Fund was £6.5 million. At 50 per cent of the total, the Government’s commitment would amount to £3.25 million. And in August 2020 the Hydro Industries board accepted an offer of further Government pandemic investment. The amount was not disclosed but could be anything between 25 per cent and 100 per cent of the Convertible Loans the company already held up to that date.

There is no evidence that Hydro Industries is not entitled to these Covid taxpayer-backed loans or that anyone lobbied inappropriately on its behalf. But the Treasury’s financial largesse comes at a sensitive moment for the Government, which has been accused of cronyism and favouritism towards Conservative Party supporters in awarding lucrative contracts during the Coronavirus crisis, and of flouting normal rules on procurement and public appointments. Many find the idea of politicians and their friends benefiting from the crisis by lining their pockets to be sleazy, immoral and deeply offensive.

Hydro’s spectacular growth and its ability to compete for multi-billion pound Government contracts pre-date the pandemic, and there is no evidence of wrong-doing on its part in applying for Covid loans. 

Harri was keen to highlight what he said was Hydro’s role in wealth creation and safeguarding the environment.

“Hydro industries harnesses home-grown Welsh technology to clean up industrial waste, protect the environment and provide safe drinking water for some of the most disadvantaged people in the world.  We also provide much needed high-quality jobs for scientists, engineers and others in Llangennech. I am proud to be involved,” he said.

Guto Harri presents S4C’s Senedd election coverage.
Guto Harri presents S4C’s Senedd election coverage.

But legitimate questions about lobbying do arise, not least thanks to David Cameron’s 2010 description of the “lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way.”  

It can hardly have hurt the cause of Hydro Industries to have a well-connected Westminster insider such as Guto Harri on its team, and not just as an employee or consultant but as a company director. He worked with Boris Johnson for four years in the London Mayor’s Office and still rates his former boss very highly, judging by his comments to Sky News when the Prime Minister was struck down with Covid-19 last year: 

“He leads from the front and he’s one of the most talented communicators you can imagine … What’s going to be really hard for him now is to let go of being there running the show because he does like to make the big judgement calls, he likes to be at the heart of things, and he’ll be worried that if he’s not there that people will not address these things with the same urgency and the same determination that he brings to it himself,” Harri told Sky News presenter Dermot Murnaghan on 6th April 2020.

Such praise for a serving Prime Minister is jarring from a supposedly fearless and impartial journalist, an image Guto Harri projects in his work presenting his own S4C politics show, Y Byd yn ei Le. Harri and Johnson go back a long way. They were contemporaries at Oxford University in the mid-1980s and, along with fellow student David Cameron, were members of the Oxford Union debating society, perennial training ground for the British elite.

For more than a decade, Harri’s career has orbited around the two Tory superstars, Cameron and Johnson, and the Welshman has rarely been outside their sphere of influence. He was reportedly courted by Cameron to become his Communications Director once the Tories got the keys to 10 Downing Street in 2010. Between 2008 and 2012, he was Boris Johnson’s Director of External Affairs during Johnson’s first term as London Mayor. He left to become PR chief at Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, then a toxic brand thanks to the phone-hacking scandal. Then followed a stint as Managing Director of External Communications at Liberty Global, owner of Virgin Media. 

In the period since 2018, the year he started his TV show on S4C, he has worked for two public affairs firms involved in political lobbying, Hanover Communications and Hawthorn Advisors. Both firms have strong ties to the Conservative Party and are listed on the statutory UK Register of Consultant Lobbyists, established by Parliament in 2014 to enhance the transparency of those seeking to lobby Ministers and senior civil servants on behalf of third parties.

Political influencers like Hanover Communications and Hawthorn Advisors have come under the spotlight thanks to campaigns by highly respected democracy and advocacy groups such as Transparency International UK and the Good Law Project. 

Hanover Communications has been described by transparency campaign group Unlock Democracy as a “Conservative lobby shop”. It was founded by Charles Lewington, former Press Secretary to Conservative Prime Minister John Major, and Lewington remains its Chief Executive. Its top team comprises a clutch of Tory acolytes, including Gavin Megaw, the former head of the Conservative Party’s rapid rebuttal operation, and Daniel Gilbert, a former Special Advisor to Jo Johnson MP, the former Universities Minister and the current Prime Minister’s brother. 

As for Harri’s second lobbying job, Hawthorn Advisors was founded by Boris Johnson’s close friend and Conservative Party co-chairman Ben Elliot, whose “tentacles in business, government and high society” stretch far and wide, according to a Sunday Times investigation last year. 

The paper detailed “a web of connections emanating from the public relations company he (Elliot) co-owns, Hawthorn Advisors, which raise questions about the revolving door between government and business” (Sunday Times 8 March 2020). 

Hawthorn Managing Director Hugo FitzGerald worked for the Conservative Party on a series of election campaigns, and senior adviser Poppy Trowbridge is a former spokeswoman and special advisor to ex-Chancellor Philip Hammond. Former Tory MP Lord Garnier QC sits on Hawthorn’s advisory board.

Guto Harri makes a game defence of lobbying in an article for the May edition of Barn, the Welsh-language current affairs magazine. He says it occupies an ambiguous and uncertain terrain in the intricate and complex field of politics. 

“Most people need help to guide them through it … A lobbying firm is essentially a pilot through alien territory, or a bridge perhaps between the desires and plans of the world of politics and the private company. When I am employed in this arena clients expect a lobbyist to know his way around the system, to know where decisions are made, and how they come about.”

In this sense, Harri says, it is likely that David Cameron did nothing wrong according to the rules. Decisions rarely start and end on the desk of the Chancellor or Health Secretary. Schemes must be sifted through the Civil Service “mill” before a Minister can give the green light, Harri writes. 

David Cameron, Harri writes, is sure to argue that he was trying to help “Greensill and his gang” to assist the health service in making more timely payments to its staff.

“But it will be hard to persuade me that the real intention was not to milk the health service rather than helping it,” Harri says.

As for Mr Harri’s own career, lobbyists Hanover Communications and Hawthorn Advisors are not the only companies that connect him to senior Tory figures. In addition to his lobbying roles, he has signed up as a public speaker for hire with Chartwell Speakers, whose roster includes a virtual Who’s Who of prominent Conservative politicians and strategists, past and present. 

Among the names on the list are former Cabinet Ministers Ken Clarke, Michael Portillo, Malcolm Rifkind and Norman Lamont, as well as Jacob Rees-Mogg, the current Leader of the House of Commons. Also on Chartwell’s roster are Boris Johnson’s brother Jo and father Stanley, and his former Chief Advisor Dominic Cummings and Communications Director Lee Cain. Former Labour Cabinet Ministers are also listed on the firm’s website, but they appear to be far outnumbered by prominent Tories. Chartwell Speakers was co-founded by Ellis Trevor, a former strategist for US Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, and its Chairman is former Goldman Sachs financier James Birch.

Guto Harri would not say how many times he had met Boris Johnson or any government minister or senior official since 2018
Guto Harri would not say how many times he had met Boris Johnson or any government minister or senior official since 2018

As David Cameron’s defenders are quick to point out, politicians, their advisors and senior staffers have a right to a business career in their afterlife, but democratic scrutiny demands that they should only be allowed to use their contacts and relationships in ways that are transparent and beyond reproach. 

Unlike Cameron, Guto Harri has never stood for election and has not held public office. He told us he has never been a member of a political party. But his relationship with Boris Johnson, forged at Oxford University and consolidated when the now Prime Minister was Mayor of London, raises serious questions about preferential access to those at the heart of Government and the links between Westminster insiders, the Tory Party and big business. 

It also shines a light on his role as a prominent Welsh journalist heading up election coverage when the Tories in Wales are looking to make historic gains in The Senedd. Harri is the director of a multi-million pound company doing business with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, regimes accused of killing journalists and condemned for major human rights abuses and even in Saudi Arabia’s case, potential war crimes in Yemen. He is also a lobbyist and insider at Westminster and Whitehall, all of which seems an anomalous position for a political correspondent to hold – at S4C or any other TV channel.”

When asked about his parallel careers as businessman, broadcaster and lobbyist, Harri said: “Everything I do is on my LinkedIn profile – it’s completely transparent. I have never been a member of a political party. And after 18 years at the BBC – as a chief political correspondent and presenter of programmes such as PM and The World at One, among other things – is it any wonder that I have a political programme on S4C? I’m very grateful for the opportunity, proud to work with such a talented team and I appreciate the positive reviews the series has enjoyed.”

According to one pioneer of American newspapers, the purpose of journalism is “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”.  But it is hard to be a grand inquisitor challenging the rich and powerful when you’re part of the same club as the people you’re supposed to be holding to account. ITV, which makes his Harri’s politics show for S4C, seems remarkably incurious about his manifold outside interests in business and the opaque world of political schmoozing and influence peddling. 

The show’s broadcaster S4C appears equally laissez-faire about any real or perceived conflicts of interest. 

Both S4C and ITV declined to answer specific questions as to what due diligence they had done with regard to Guto Harri’s role as a political correspondent and presenter.

Geraint Evans, Commissioner of News and Current Affairs at S4C, said: “Y Byd yn ei Le, presented by Guto Harri, is one ingredient in a wide range of election programming commissioned by S4C and we believe that Guto’s depth of experience in politics enables him to bring an unique perspective to our coverage. 

“S4C is aware that as a freelance presenter he has other business interests, but he displays total professionalism in his approach to our programming and is always prepared to challenge the views of politicians whichever party they represent. Y Byd yn ei Le is also subject to the editorial control of both the ITV Cymru Wales production team and the Commissioner of News and Current Affairs at S4C. We are satisfied that all political parties receive the same impartial scrutiny and will continue to do so during the election period.”

In a statement ITV Cymru Wales said: “Guto Harri is a well established and respected presenter of political programming and we have strict editorial and compliance controls in place within our production teams to ensure fairness and due impartiality within all our output, including our political programming for S4C.”

*Marc Edwards is an investigative journalist and freelance TV producer. He has held senior editorial roles at BBC Cymru Wales and ITV Cymru Wales.