A club frequented by Conservative MPs has lined the party’s pockets to the tune of a quarter of a million pounds after taking almost £850,000 in Covid bailout cash.
According to reports in The Mirror, diners at the Carlton Club near the Ritz have furnished Conservative MPs and their local associations with substantial sums of money over recent years.
In January, Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson, who has been in the press for telling asylum seekers to “f**k off back to France”, was given £15,000 from the private members’ club.
Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, the Carlton Club and its connected groups such as its political committee have donated a total of £247,300 to the Conservatives.
Commenting on the matter, Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, said: “Under the cover of a global pandemic, the Conservative Government funnelled hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to the Tory Old Boys network.
“While good British companies were left out in the cold, unable to access government support, the Tory social club enjoyed the fruits of their crony network.
“There are serious questions to answer, particularly from a Prime Minister who sat on his hands while billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was wasted on Covid fraud. The Government must urgently come clean about how taxpayers’ money appears to have been abused in this way.”
The Carlton Club was founded in 1832 and is Britain’s oldest Conservative club and was the original home of the party.
According to its accounts, it received over £843,000 in grants from the Government in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic. This was made up of £799,000 from the coronavirus job retention scheme and a national lockdown grant of £44,000.
In January, a portrait of Boris Johnson was revealed, while the club also made the headlines after Chris Pincher, who at the time was the Tory Deputy Chief Whip, groped two men there.
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