Peter Geoghegan keeps us up to date with the latest news of Hakluyt and Labour in the London Review of Books:
Labour is said to have turned last September to another ‘strategic advisory’ firm, Hakluyt, to facilitate meetings with business leaders. Hakluyt began in a field in which the UK truly excels: private spying.
Named after the Elizabethan geographer Richard Hakluyt, the company was founded in 1995 by a group of former MI6 agents, but in recent years has sought to distance itself from the world of spooks. Spying on Greenpeace activists on behalf of oil companies is supposedly a thing of the past.
The company’s website looks more like that of a private bank than a corporate espionage outfit, with a list of staff and advisers that includes the Conservative peers Paul Deighton and William Hague, director and chairman respectively. The former Labour minister Shriti Vadera sits on the advisory board.
‘Hakluyt sells its political connections,’ a contact who has worked in London’s corporate intelligence world for decades told me. ‘It’s incredibly well connected. That’s how it can charge so much. Hakluyt wouldn’t get out of bed for less than a hundred grand.’
Its contact book is set to become even more valuable now Starmer has appointed its managing partner, Varun Chandra, a former investment banker who helped set up Tony Blair Associates, as his special adviser on business and investment (Chandra duly resigned from Hakluyt). He might well be joined in government by Olly Robbins, the former Brexit chief negotiator and a Hakluyt partner. Another Hakluyt executive is Tony Benn’s granddaughter Emily Benn.
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