As David Cameron’s new department is accused of watering down minister’s warning letter on takeover to avoid offending Emirates rulers: the former Foreign Office boss with a surprisingly colourful history

Sir Simon Fraser, the former civil servant who is now serving to Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour attempt to seize management of The Telegraph, is aware of a battle of curiosity when he sees one.

Back in 2010, when the lobbyist was appointed to the prime job at Her Majesty’s Foreign Office, it emerged that his earlier stint there had led to scandal.

Specifically, he’d been compelled to give up as non-public secretary to William Waldegrave, a Foreign Office minister in the Major Government, after turning into romantically concerned with an official at the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

Sir Simon, now 65, had established what former colleagues described as a ‘co-habiting relationship’ with the Palestinian girl.

That was, at greatest, a dangerous look: her employer was then considered a terrorist group.

‘Simon thought of his place and determined that this relationship, which was a loving one, may trigger issues amongst the authorities and in his skilled life,’ mentioned a colleague.

‘He then went to Waldegrave, of his personal volition, defined his place and determined it was smart to stand down. He has since gone on to take pleasure in a stellar profession.’

Given this chapter in Sir Simon’s life, there was concern in Israel when he was introduced again in 2010, this time to run the Foreign Office. The nation’s Arutz Sheva newspaper complained that the revelation that Britain’s new prime diplomat had hyperlinks to a ‘terrorism-backing PLO official’ got here ‘sizzling on the heels’ of a clumsy incident by which then Prime Minister David Cameron had referred to as Gaza a ‘jail camp’.

Fast ahead 13 years, and Sir Simon — who lives in a £2 million pile in Kilburn, North West London, with spouse Shireen, mom of his two grown-up daughters — finds himself dealing with one other difficult spherical of scrutiny.

This time, it revolves round the Cambridge-educated former mandarin’s profitable new life at the lobbying agency Flint Global, which he joined in 2015. For his agency has been retained by RedBird IMI, an Abu Dhabi-backed outfit pursuing a £1.2 billion deal to take over The Telegraph.

The extremely controversial bid raises awkward questions on Press freedom, human rights, and the knowledge of permitting somebody so carefully linked to a repressive Arab autocracy to get his arms on one of Britain’s most influential media companies.

It will due to this fact face scrutiny from the very highest degree of Government. And right here, Sir Simon has connections in all the proper locations.

Only three months in the past, one of Flint Global’s companions, a former particular advisor to David Cameron named Adam Atashzai, moved into Downing Street to start work as a senior aide to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

He’s not the solely well-placed contact in Sir Simon’s Rolodex, both.

There can even be previous colleagues from Whitehall. And, coincidentally, his former Department does appear to be interfering with an official inquiry into Sheikh Mansour’s takeover of the newspaper group, in accordance to two separate stories that have been printed yesterday.

One in the Daily Telegraph — sarcastically the title at the centre of the saga — claimed Foreign Office officers had intervened to ‘soften’ language utilized by Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer in a assertion the place she claimed to be ‘minded’ to refer the deal to regulators.

The second, printed by The Times, acknowledged that the Foreign Office has ‘expressed reservations to the Government over the potential diplomatic fallout’ from upsetting any senior figures from the oil wealthy Arab nation, which is an absolute monarchy.

It’s a whiffy enterprise. But as Sir Simon properly is aware of, British diplomats have historic type for seemingly doing favours for ultra-wealthy Middle Eastern regimes. A pair of years again, it emerged that mandarins had even intervened to block a police investigation into the kidnapping of an Arab princess named Sheikha Shamsa from the streets of Cambridge.

Apparently, the Foreign Office did not need to upset her father Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai (and a horse racing chum of the late Queen) who allegedly ordered the abduction.

Since leaving public service, Sir Simon has actually displayed few qualms about accepting highly-paid work from questionable states.

He based Flint Global with Nigel Gardner, a former BBC journalist turned lobbyist whose earlier shoppers included the Kremlin-owned oil firm Gazprom.

And one of their most high-profile paymasters has since been Huawei, the Chinese telecoms big which has invested huge quantities of capital to grow to be deeply embedded in the UK’s cell phone methods. Sir Simon’s agency tried, and ultimately failed, to assist cease the firm — which is carefully affiliated to China’s despotic regime — from being banned from Britain’s 5G networks as a excessive safety danger.

Sir Simon has additionally accepted contracts from a vary of free-spending billionaires who want to lower probably controversial offers in the UK, together with Czech tycoon Karel Komarek, who employed Flint to assist him get maintain of the working licence for the National Lottery, and Patrick Drahi, a Franco-Israeli telecoms magnate with designs on BT.

It all appears in protecting with his pedigree as a shut affiliate of Peter Mandelson — Fraser was the Prince of Darkness’s Chief of Staff from 2004 to 2008, when Mandelson was an EU Trade Commissioner.

And although he is reluctant to discuss publicly about his agency’s shoppers, Sir Simon has, like most Whitehall grandees, been positively garrulous over latest years in opining on Brexit. Or, as he as soon as put it: ‘the harmful and humiliating Brexit fiasco,’ which at the height of post-referendum hysteria he described on a podcast as a greater blow to the UK than the Suez disaster.

Such remarks would have lower little ice with earlier Tory PMs. But with Rishi Sunak in cost, and David Cameron again in the Cabinet, shoppers seem to be below the impression that Fraser and his agency may be extra possible to ship.

According to Sky News, which broke information of Flint’s work for the Abu Dhabi-backed Telegraph bidders, the agency was employed as a result of of its ‘observe document of involvement in public curiosity intervention notices (PIINs) — authorities probes carried out by the media and competitors watchdogs which might lead to offers being blocked’.

Importantly, on this regard, Sir Simon is lobbying on behalf of RedBird IMI with the help of a fixer named Ed Richards.

Richards is not solely a former advisor to Tony Blair (a man who can spot a wealthy Arab a mile off), but in addition the particular person the New Labour Prime Minister positioned in cost of Ofcom in 2006.

He ran the media regulator till 2014. Now, simply a few years later, he is being paid to cease it blocking the sale of a main information organisation.

In different phrases, this former public servant is getting wealthy by lobbying former colleagues at the very regulator he beforehand ran.

Again, it is a murky enterprise.

But for Sheikh Mansour to achieve getting his arms on the Telegraph, backs will want to be scratched in all the proper locations.