Boris Johnson accepted £10,000 worth of free accommodation from the wife of the leading Tory donor who hosted his wedding reception this summer, it has emerged.
The updated register of MPs’ interests shows the former prime minister accepted a £10,000 gift from Lady Carol Bamford for “concessional accommodation for me and my family in September”.
Lord Anthony Bamford, a pro-Brexit Conservative who is chairman of construction equipment maker JCB, has been a major Tory donor for decades. The billionaire entrepreneur, who backed Johnson’s successful leadership bid in 2019, has given more than £10m in donations and gifts to the party since 2001.
The latest register of MPs’ interests published this week shows Liz Truss also accepted an £8,000 donation from Bamford to cover ‘transport’ during her leadership campaign.
It comes after the register showed the Prime Minister was given more than £500,000 for her leadership campaign. About half of that comes from donors linked to hedge fund bosses, venture capitalists and other City financiers.
Boris Johnson poses with his wife Carrie in the garden of 10 Downing Street after their wedding at Westminster Cathedral in May 2021. Picture: Downing Street/Getty Images
In July, Bamford played host to Boris and Carrie Johnson as they celebrated their wedding, which took place in seclusion in the grounds of his 18th-century mansion Daylesford House in the Cotswolds. Johnson scrapped plans to hold the celebration at the prime minister’s official country residence, Checkers, in Buckinghamshire. The “festival-style” celebration is said to have included a steel band, rum punch, Abba songs and congas.
A previous register of MPs’ financial interests showed that JCB paid Johnson £10,000 three days before he gave a speech at headquarters in January 2019 in which he repeatedly praised the company’s business acumen and innovation. The speech in Staffordshire was mainly about Brexit, but mentioned JCB several times, noting at the outset how the company had sold nearly 750,000 units of a single excavator model.
He rammed a digger displaying the slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’ through a fake brick wall emblazoned with ‘Gridlock’ during a visit to a JCB factory in a campaign stunt in 2019.
In 2022, Johnson faced a backlash after he used his visit to India to once again hail the success of JCB for using its machines in mass home demolitions.
Amid a bitter row over the demolition of predominantly Muslim settlements in an area of Delhi hit by communal violence, television footage showed JCB bulldozers being used to level properties.
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