Pyramid of Lies: The Prime Minister, the Banker and the Billion Pound Scandal

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Johnson ran the Spectator as he ended up running the London mayoralty. He presided, but as far as day-to-day matters were concerned, relied heavily on his deputy, Stuart Reid, not least to make sense of an often chaotic commissioning process where some writers were left wondering if pieces urgently demanded by Johnson would ever be published. And this source said to me, well, you really should and sort of provided me with a little bit of documentation, and I started to look into them they were connected to a scandal that was kind of emerging at a company called GAM, a Swiss asset manager, somebody called a hedge fund. And Greensill was sort of part of that story, but a very minor part of it, at least that's how it was portrayed in most reporting on it.

I mean in the end, I think you made several million pounds. It's unclear exactly how much Cameron was paid, but certainly a substantial amount of money. I think there was also, for Cameron may be, an appeal that this was a fast-growing fintech in theory. And so that's a bit more exciting than going to work on the Board of an established company. A bit cooler, a bit more kind of future of Britain. And so I think there's an appeal. What's interesting to me is that the red flags around Greensill were pretty easy to spot by then. While Mr Johnson has never publicly admitted to the affair, his spokesperson claimed he “acted with honesty and integrity” in his dealings with Ms Arcuri. Vote Leave bus Cameron was an authentic member of the upper class who might polish him up. After he destroyed his career and the country’s prospects by taking the UK out of the EU by mistake, Cameron yearned for a comfort Lex Greensill could offer him: obscene amounts of money. He gets business cards with Downing Street that [indiscernible] (00:09:13) and that kind of thing. He holds meetings in Downing Street, really kind of pushes it beyond -- his role beyond what it really ought to have been. But it seems to work for him. And certainly, when Cameron leaves office, he leaves having left Lex with a much higher profile than he had previously. Work on the flat above No 11 began in April 2020, while the Prime Minister was in hospital with Covid. Reports at the time suggested his wife, Carrie Symonds, was horrified at the “John Lewis furniture nightmare” left behind by the Prime Minister’s predecessor, Theresa May, though she has denied the claims.Even Johnson conceded that the other two candidates – David Platt and Jill Andrew, both lawyers – were better than him on the night. Platt was the association’s favourite, but his cause had been damaged by questions about his unmarried status. “My single greatest advantage over David Platt was that I had a wife, beaming up at me from the front row, with every appearance of interest, wearing a suitably colourful flowery coat,” Johnson wrote in his 2001 book Friends, Voters, Countrymen. He beat Platt by a handful of votes. NATHAN HUNT: Sadly, the losers from Greensill's collapse extend beyond just a few venture capitalists and private equity investors. What was Credit Suisse's role in spreading the exposure to Greensill? Barlow’s American assistant, Cameron, is described as having “a deep and sexist reverence for men who really knew stuff”. He wrote: “It amazed her sometimes how little appearances mattered. He could be bald, he could be spindly or sweaty or tubby, but if the man’s disquisition had enough interest, fluency and authority, it would speak directly to her groin.” Before his successful switch to politics, Mr Johnson enjoyed a lengthy career in journalism. But an auspicious start met its first hurdle when Mr Johnson was fired from The Times’ trainee scheme in 1988 for making up quotes.

And interestingly, as soon as he gets a role at Greensill Capital, which lends a lot of credibility to the firm to have a former Prime Minister working for you is really a stamp of approval. Why David even did it is really interesting, right? So I think what's the upside for him of his relationship with Greensill Capital: one, is potentially a huge payout. So he gets paid a decent salary, and he gets paid a good bonus, but he also gets options, which had they paid off, he would have got tens of millions of pounds. A few years ago, I made it into an intimate meeting at the "top table". Just me and the top brass. I had prepared copious notes to discuss the large deal that was imminent. But I hadn't prepared to discuss horse racing, the ownership of horses, or the best dogs to keep at stables. As the Conservative Party self-immolates in the wake of the public’s final loss of patience with the Prime Minister, Duncan Mavin’s new book, The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal, is a useful reminder that the creeping (now overwhelming) impression of tawdriness in public life did not begin with Boris. And I think they looked at Lex Greensill and said, yes, this guy -- there's some challenges with this guy. Yes, he tends to double down on risky things. He tends to make every loan we can rather than be a bit more discerning. But that's our job, right? Our job is to invest in these people and then shape them the way that we think they should be running their businesses. In this case, they couldn't do that, right? And so that was an error on their part. That's my view anyway.NATHAN HUNT: One of the strangest parts of the book for me was the -- and it's a minor point, but it was the fact that when Lex Greensill had attained his position in Downing Street, he nonetheless, also chose to misrepresent his relationship with the Obama administration in the United States. He apparently had been in a meeting in the White House on an occasion, but he turned that into sort of a formal advisory relationship. Why on earth would he lie about something that doesn't give him any additional benefit beyond the Downing Street relationship he already has?

And it's a question I took to Credit Suisse, and I took to SoftBank as a journalist many times. It was so startlingly problematic. In the end, The Bond & Credit Co. was taken over by a company -- Japanese insurer, Tokio Marine. And when Tokio Marine got involved, they looked at The Bond & Credit Co's exposure to Greensill and the Green -- the funds that were investing in Greensill assets. And they said, hey, this is too much. We don't want to do this anymore. And that really spelled the end, right, because without that insurance, the funds that have invested in Greensill's assets, they're no longer able to go out to the same pool of investors. During that time and despite holding two jobs for much of it, Johnson wrote and wrote. Perhaps most notably, in Friends, Voters, Countrymen, he said that despite his Euroscepticism, he believed the UK’s interests were “on balance served by maintaining our [EU] membership”.To its founder, Greensill Capital is more than a business: his whole new identity depends upon it. As the story unfolds, we see his drive and determination evolve fatally into messianic ambition and a blinkered disregard for differing views. Despite these concerns, with a safe and prosperous seat, getting to the House of Commons was never going to be difficult; his majority in 2001 was 8,458 over the Liberal Democrats, rising to 12,793 in the following election. Labour was in power throughout, so there was no requirement to defend unpopular government policies.

The past few months have proven difficult for the Prime Minister, with Mr Johnson forced to face a series of lobbying scandals within his own party that refreshed accusations of “Tory sleaze”.He has never issued a public apology to Ms Wyatt. Her mother later claimed Ms Wyatt was forced to have an abortion as a result of her relationship with Mr Johnson. Jennifer Arcuri Boris Johnson has never publicly admitted to his alleged affair with US tech entrepreneur Jennifer Arcuri (Photo: Eugene Metreveli) Lex Greensill had a simple, billion-dollar idea – democratising supply chain finance. Suppliers want to get their invoices paid as soon as possible. Companies want to hold off as long as they can. Greensill bridged the two, it’s mundane, boring even, but he saw an opportunity to profit. However, margins are thin and Lex, ever the risk taker, made lucrative loans with other people’s money: to a Russian cargo plane linked to Vladmir Putin, to former Special Forces who ran a private army, and crucially to companies that were fraudulent or had no revenue. And so suddenly, you see sort of vast amounts of assets pouring into these Credit Suisse funds. In truth, just to echo what I said a little bit earlier, in truth, it wasn't just supply chain finance assets. It was, in fact, kind of loans to risky businesses, some of them complex steel businesses run by Sanjeev Gupta. And so this is Credit Suisse's clients' money. Some of it's pension fund money, some of it's big sovereign wealth fund money. Some of it's money from individual private clients. And in that case, there's a few million dollars of maybe somebody who has got a little bit more than that has been poured into these funds, which have been sold as ultrasafe, but in fact, they aren't really. They're full of risky loans. And so Credit Suisse played a really important role in fueling Greensill Capital growth, but also spreading the risk to people who didn't understand what they were getting into.