James Tumbridge & The Hard Right At The City Of London Council

In February this year a picture of Tower ward councillor James Tumbridge turned up in national press showing him taking a selfie with disastrous – and short lived – former Prime Minister Liz Truss, with Nigel Farage looking on. The photo was taken at the launch of the hard right Popular Conservativism grouping at the Emmanuel Centre in central London.

Aside from his interest in the Popular Conservativism faction of the Tory party, it is also clear from Tumbridge’s website that he is positioned on the hard right. The endorsement page features Priti Patel MP (not to be confused with the woman in the insurance business with the same name also featured on the same webpage) and extreme neo-liberal City of London councillors Edward Lord and Mark Wheatley (both – as is Tumbridge – masons).

In Tumbridge’s old City councillor register of interests alongside his legal and freemasonic activities, it is revealed that he was a non-executive director of Kanto Elect. Tumbridge resigned his directorship at Kanto Elect on 11 March 2020, shortly after the dark money bankrolled political activities of its founder – and one Tumbridge’s Conservative pals – Thomas Borwick were exposed in the media:

Vote Leave’s former chief technology officer boasted to colleagues that he could use unknown online campaign groups to “split the vote” of Conservative opponents, Open Democracy has learned.

Thomas Borwick, a digital consultant closely linked to the Tories, has been accused of “pretending” to be the Green Party after buying social media ads that called on voters in key swing constituencies to “Vote Green” and “support your local Green candidate”.

A former colleague of Borwick’s said that the 32-year-old deputy chairman of the Cities of London and Westminster Conservatives had previously discussed using anonymous-looking campaigns to buy political ads to “split the vote” of anti-Tory parties. The ads, he said, could be bought unbeknownst to the party in whose name they appear.

A previously-unknown company owned by Borwick called 3rd Party Ltd bought ads on Facebook and Instagram that have been seen at least 200,000 times in less than a week, Wired revealed. The company, which was only set up this month, is also running social media ads to “Save Brexit”…

Borwick, who worked as a consultant for Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL, has said that elections in the digital age are won by splitting the electorate into fragments that can be sent targeted messages. As chief technology officer at Vote Leave, he divided the UK into 72 groups of voters who were sent tens of millions of Facebook ads…

Borwick is closely tied to Conservative politics. His mother, Victoria, is a former Tory MP and his father, Conservative hereditary peer Lord Borwick, runs the party’s Renaissance Forum donor club.

Thomas Borwick is the founder and CEO of a range of professional campaigning organisations mainly based around elections and technology. These operate from a family-owned Westminster house on Great College Street, just off College Green. The companies used to operate as the Kanto Group. However, the group and its members have attracted a lot of negative publicity, from Vote Leave’s controversial use of data-mining techniques when Borwick was its chief technology officer, through to questions raised about Kanto running anti-abortion adverts in Ireland’s referendum last year.

Last year, it emerged in Private Eye that Borwick had hired two of Cambridge Analytica’s most senior data scientists, Dr Tadas Jucikas and Dr Brent Clickard, who had both gone to ground after the collapse of SCL/Cambridge Analytica.

Extensive steps had been taken to ensure that the participation of the two data scientists in Borwick’s business ventures remained a secret. However Dr Clickard was photographed by Google Street View emerging from the company’s Great College Street address.

Open Democracy has also learned that Borwick’s business empire has been rebranded as the College Green Group, with the company having been incorporated in October. The new company website makes no mention of Borwick. Of the former Kanto companies, only Kanto Elections retains the branding. The College Green Group also has an external office on Victoria Street, a ten-minute walk away from their main building.

It is unorthodox for an active Conservative to campaign for the Green Party – and a breach of the party’s rules. Cities of London and Westminster Conservative Association, where Borwick is Deputy Chairman, was contacted for comment, and specifically asked if this was not grounds for expulsion from the Conservative Party. A spokesman said, “What he does in his personal time is none of our business”, and directed enquiries to Borwick himself.

In 2017, Borwick, who runs a number of secretive digital campaigning consultancies from a well-heeled office overlooking Parliament, paid-for social media adverts targeting anti-Brexit Conservative MPs.

These ads accused the MPs of “sabotage”. Tory MP Anna Soubry said Borwick was “stoking and fuelling the fire” of online hate. Borwick declined to say where the funding for the ads came from. The Information Commissioner’s Officer subsequently started investigating the firm’s use of voters’ personal information for targeting purposes during the Brexit referendum.

Revealed: Former Vote Leave data chief accused of pro-Tory ‘disinformation’. Thomas Borwick, former Cambridge Analytica consultant, boasted he could use proxy groups on Facebook to ‘split anti-Tory vote’. Experts say system ‘wide open to abuse’ by Peter Geoghegan, Open Democracy, 25 November 2019. See the original piece here.*

Assuming Tumbridge gets more involved in Popular Conservatism, it seems likely he will become more visibly linked to City councillors with Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) affiliations such as Amy Horscroft and Andrew Mayer. The IEA provided Liz Truss with the shock doctrines and policies that tanked the UK economy during her brief tenure as prime minister – and Tumbridge has been listed on the IEA’s website as one its authors for several years.

Tumbridge appears to have ambitions to advance his political career, and in the City of London that means being seen to be pro-establishment, and so he observed the undemocratic convention of not standing against incumbent alders last month when Nicholas Lyons stood for re-election in Tower. Tumbridge came third when he stood against Lyons for the same post in September 2017.

At least some Tower ward voters appear unaware of Tumbridge’s hard right politics and don’t realise just how extreme his ‘conservatism’ is. They may also be wondering why Tumbridge’s most recent register of interests (published on 15 December 2023) still lists him as a (Conservative) councillor at Brentwood Borough Council, when he hasn’t held a seat there since May 2021 – as confirmed in his LinkedIn profile. One thing is certain, like all the other Conservative Party members who stand in the City as non-affiliated candidates, Tumbridge is not a genuine independent.

The header shows former Brentwood Conservative councillor James Tumbridge – who stands in the City as an ‘independent’ – with Liz Truss. Below: Tumbridge with another key member of the hard right Popular Conservatism grouping Mark Littlewood.

Notes

*Borwick continues to be embroiled in controversies. For example:

The chair of the local Conservative Party association has become the subject of a potential conflict of interest, after it emerged that potential election candidates had received assistance from a company he owns.

Thomas Borwick, who was elected to lead the local Tory group last September, is also a founding director of the College Green Group, which provides assistance to aspiring MPs on their journey into parliament.

Campaigners in the race to be the Conservative candidate for the Two Cities are thought to have connections to the group…

At least one local party member has now submitted a formal complaint to CCHQ requesting that the contest be suspended and restarted, according to the journalist Michael Crick.

Local Conservative Association Chair Caught Up In Possible Conflict Of Interest by Ryan Prosser, Westminster Times, 22 March 2024. See the original here.

And:

Tim Barnes has been chosen as the Conservative candidate to fight for the Cities of London and Westminster constituency at the next general election, replacing incumbent Nickie Aiken MP. In February, Ms Aiken announced she would step down at the next election, sparking a race to replace her.

Mr Barnes, a former Westminster City councillor who lost a re-election in 2022, won the party’s nomination following two rounds of balloting of local party members on Sunday. It is understood that Mr Barnes faced lawyer and former Vauxhall Conservative candidate Sarah Bool and Jamie Ndoku-Goodwin, a former advisor to Matt Hancock [Downing Street director of strategy]. It is believed that under local party rules, a candidate must secure a clear majority of 50 per cent or more of the vote to clinch the nomination.

It comes after London Tories claimed the selection process had been “tainted” and called for a re-run. They expressed concern over the association chairman’s influence over the process after it was alleged three of the longlisted candidates of the seat were paid clients of a political advisory where Thomas Borwick is a director and listed as a person with significant control.

They claimed one of the candidates who applied for the seat was Mr Borwick’s mother, former Kensington MP Victoria Borwick. It is understood that Mr Borwick recused himself from the weekend’s meetings, which were then chaired by Theresa May’s husband, Philip May.

Tories Choose Their General Election Candidate – But Not Without Whiff Of Controversy by Adrian Zorzut, London News Online, 28 March 2024. See the original here.

Borwick has also been embroiled in controversy recently over his attempts to evade new transparency rules around All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs):

Thomas Borwick’s ‘political consultancy’ College Green Group has rebadged its APPGs in what an MP says is an ‘explicit’ attempt to avoid transparency regulations…

An investigation by this newsletter has found that in recent weeks, a Conservative-linked political consultancy has rebadged the three APPGs it administers in what critics claim is an “explicit” attempt to evade scrutiny.

College Green Group has been paid more than £1 million to run the secretariats for cross-party groups over the past four years. The company is owned and run by Thomas Borwick, who was chief technology officer on the Vote Leave campaign.

Earlier this month, the names of the three APPGs which College Green currently administers – on environmental, social and governance (ESG); the housing market; and regeneration and levelling up – were changed on social media to ‘parliamentary liaison groups’. Parliament’s portcullis logo was also removed.

The term ‘parliamentary liaison groups’ has no official definition and is not commonly used in Westminster. Unlike APPGs, these groups will not have to register with the parliamentary commissioner for standards….

Transparency campaigners and MPs have raised concerns that College Green’s new cross-party groups will skirt new rules that include limiting APPGs to four officers to improve accountability, and, from the next parliament, allow MPs to sit on a maximum of six groups.

College Green’s ‘liaison groups’ are already active. In mid-March, the newly minted parliamentary liaison group on ESG held its ‘inaugural roundtable’ in Westminster.

The group is chaired by Alexander Stafford, Conservative MP for Rother Valley, who also led the now defunct APPG of the same name.

Last year, this newsletter revealed that College Green’s ESG APPG had received hundreds of thousands of pounds from funders that had been fined for fraud, tax and environmental failings.

College Green is advertising for a ‘parliamentary liaison group account manager’. For a salary of up to £50,000 the successful candidate’s responsibilities will include running the “secretariat for several new parliamentary liaison groups” and “monitoring parliamentary proceedings to identify opportunities for legislative and spoken interventions.”

College Green had previously made much of its work with all-party parliamentary groups. Its website had boasted of services such as achieving “the cross-party Commons and Lords membership that an effective APPG needs.” This page now appears to have been taken down from College Green’s website…

Tommy Sheppard, a Scottish National Party MP who sat on Westminster’s committee on standards for two years, said the rebranding of APPGs as ‘liaison groups’ was “explicitly for the purposes of creating a faux legitimacy, using the language of parliamentary and parliamentary groups to suggest these groups are something that they’re not.”

“Why would you do this?” Sheppard added. “You would only do this if you were unable or unwilling to comply with the new regulations that are designed to improve transparency.”

Rose Whiffen, senior research officer at Transparency International said that this newsletter’s investigation showed “that those determined to avoid scrutiny can circumvent regulations placed on APPGs and operate outside parliamentary oversight altogether.”

“Parliament should introduce a comprehensive statutory lobbying register to avoid leaving loopholes for opaque outside interests to influence our decision makers behind closed doors,” she added.

Revealed: Ex-Vote Leave Lobbyist Tries A Rebrand – Evading New Transparency Rules by Peter Geoghegan, Democracy For Sale newsletter, 27 March 2024. See the original here.