Parliament may be in recess, but Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government still can’t catch a break. The Prime Minister is facing further allegations of cronyism after a pro-Labour lobbyist was appointed to a top government advisory job. Dear, oh dear…

Iain Anderson, a prominent businessman who defected to Labour from the Tories in 2023, has now been hired to the Department for Business and Trade as a non-executive director. Yet Anderson will not be stepping down from his executive chairman role at Cicero, a lobbying firm whose roster includes Royal Mail, Barclays and Accenture – the latter being a management consultancy firm which holds multiple government contracts. How curious.

Anderson was the previous Tory government’s LGBT+ business champion under Boris Johnson but defected to Labour in 2023 over the Conservative party’s ‘relationship with business’. In the lead-up to the election, the businessman conducted a review for Starmer’s army that called for the party to focus on engaging with business and even donated £2,500 to help the lefty lot fight a by-election against the Tories.

Sceptics have accused the appointment as being ‘payback’ for Anderson’s defection to Labour, while another business insider called the hire a ‘blatant conflict of interest’ over worries the role could be used to further the interests of Cicero’s clients. Meanwhile a rival lobbyist fumed to the Times:

There is a very good reason why lobbyists can’t also work in government and this is a flagrant breach of this. So much for Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge to put the government ‘back in the service’ of working people.

Another added:

Nothing says ‘cleaning up politics’ like giving a lobbyist a job as a departmental non-executive director.

Ouch.

It follows the Labour government’s controversial appointments of former Labour donors Ian Corfield and Emily Middleton – to the Treasury and the Department for Science and Technology respectively – earlier in the year, which raised ‘cash for jobs’ concerns. Then the Telegraph reported that more than 200 ‘cronies’ had been appointed to the civil service without open competition since the July election, and more recently Steerpike revealed that 60 per cent of Downing Street vacancies were only made available to internal applicants since the Starmtroopers took power. Hardly a transparent government in practice, eh?