THIS MONTH, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy made Tory donor and property developer Jamie Ritblat one of the “commissioners” of Historic England, the government body which gives orders to preserve historic buildings and monuments.

It’s not a paid job, but the post confers a lot of respectability and distinction. It is the kind of appointment rich people love.

Ritblat’s father, Sir John Ritblat, is also a Tory-donating property developer who sits on lots of “cultural” and “educational” boards, so Nandy giving his son a role at Historic England is likely helping Ritblat emulate his dad.

But many Labour supporters may not see Ritblat as someone who deserves public approval — so what is going on with this and other recent appointments by Keir Starmer’s government of notable Tories? 

Ritblat is the founder and chairman of Delancey Real Estate. His company has given the Tories £350,000 between 2011 and 2020. It is among the Conservative Party’s big property donors. Nandy’s press notice described Delancey as “renowned for landmark and complex regeneration projects,” praising its “stewardship of estates in historically significant areas,” like turning the London 2012 Olympics athletes’ village into housing.

But the then-Tory government sold Delancey the athletes’ village at a £275 million loss, and did so shortly after Delancey made its first £50,000 donation to the Conservatives. Delancey denies there was any link between these events, but a Tory-supporting company doing well out of a Tory government raised eyebrows at the time.

How is Delancey’s “stewardship” of the former Olympic village going? Delancey is keen on the “build-to-rent” model, at the kind of high rents that fuel London’s property prices. In the former athletes’ village, a studio flat will cost £2,100 a month and a two-bed flat will set you back £2,900 a month.

Delancey handed over management of a small part of the development to an affordable housing provider, Triathlon Homes. However, in 2022, fire defects, including flammable cladding, were discovered in some of the homes.

Triathlon wants Delancey — via one of its subsidiaries — to pay for the repairs, costing around £16m. A court said Delancey should pay to make the buildings fire safe, but Delancey has been trying to get out of the award by challenging the ruling. This July, an appeal court found against Delancey, suggesting it thinks Delancey is trying to evade responsibility. 

Delancey is also the main developer in south London’s Elephant and Castle shopping centre, where protesters argue it hasn’t included enough affordable small retail units or social housing, driving out ordinary local people in “social cleansing.”

That’s not the only problem with Delancey’s “stewardship” of “historic” estates. In 2022, HM Revenue & Customs launched a lawsuit against Delancey and its advisers, saying that its “misrepresentations” meant it had underpaid tax.

According to HMRC, between 2015 and 2019, a Delancey “trust” paid £141m to Delancey employees, with £63m going to Ritblat personally, but only £400 was paid in tax.

Last July, HMRC and Delancey came to a settlement. The amounts involved are not public, but HMRC said the settlement was what it “would have reasonably expected to achieve if successful at court, without the time and cost of further litigation,” implying a payment of tens of millions of pounds to the taxman.

So Ritblat’s firm has profited from public property sold at a huge loss, his firm is behind the kind of high rents which are part of the housing crisis, has argued with HMRC over unpaid tax, extensively uses “offshore” mechanisms for its business and has gone to court to try to resist responsibility for fixing cladding, post-Grenfell. 

Ritblat’s appointment follows a number of top Tories given these “trophy” unpaid roles by Labour since the election. Then-culture minister Chris Bryant put Akshata Murty (wife of Rishi Sunak) onto the board of the Victoria and Albert museum and Tory Lord Finkelstein onto the British Museum board.

Then-Labour business secretary Jonathan Reynolds reappointed former Tory minister Mark Lancaster as “government defence advocate” in January, a job he was originally given by then-trade secretary Kemi Badenoch.

One way of looking at this is that Labour ministers are trying to make sure that a future Tory government might also look kindly on them when it comes to government appointments.

A more Machiavellian possibility is that Labour ministers want to keep friendly with some Tories because they may want a Macron-style “grand coalition of the centre” to counterbalance a big vote for Reform UK in a future election, bringing in some anti-Farage centrist and Thatcherite Conservatives into a possible coalition. 

Election spending is a big-tech bonanza

TECH firms Facebook and Google can count themselves among the biggest winners from last year’s general election, according to the latest figures on party spending from the Electoral Commission released recently.

Overall spending by the major parties with Facebook owner Meta jumped to £8m, up 44 per cent since the 2019 general election, while party spending on Google advertisements increased by 48 per cent to £2.7m. Collectively, the largest political parties — Labour, the Conservatives, Lib Dems, SNP, Reform UK and Greens — spent £69m on advertising, leaflets, advice and other political expenses in 2024. 

Unusually, Labour’s election spending of around £30m outstripped the Conservatives, who spent £23.8m. This extra spend included £5.2m given to Meta and Google, a 66 per cent increase on 2019. The Tories gave Meta and Google around £3.7m — almost double their spending at the previous election.

With a volatile electorate and party loyalty waning, campaigning has shifted to individualised social media and away from more “collective” platforms such as party rallies, canvassing and newspaper and billboard advertising.

But while Reform UK’s £5.4m spending partially reflected this move — it included £735,000 for Meta and Google in 2024 — unlike other parties, it also took the traditional approach, perhaps in a push to reach older newspaper-reading voters.

Its biggest single spend was £906,000 with A&N Media Finance Services, for full-page ads and “online takeovers” in the Mail and other titles. It also spent £316,000 on full-page ads in the Sun.

Reform UK’s big spending on the Mail and the Sun may also be an attempt by Farage to curry favour with newspaper barons Lord Rothermere and Rupert Murdoch, seeing them as key gatekeepers of the right wing.

Follow Solomon Hughes on X @solhugheswriter.