Questions for Cameron over Lynton Crosby’s links to alcohol and tobacco firms

After minimum alcohol pricing and plain cigarette packaging are dropped from the Queen's Speech, Labour and Tory MPs point to the election chief's connections.

By George Eaton

As notable as what is in today’s Queen’s Speech is what isn’t. Despite repeated promises by ministers, the speech will not include a bill enshrining the government’s commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on aid in law, nor, to the dismay of public heath campaigners, will there be any mention of minimum alcohol pricing or plain cigarette packaging. Only gay marriage survives as an emblem of Cameroon modernisation.

Conservative MPs attribute this strategic shift to Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ recently appointed campaign strategist, who speaks of scraping the “barnacles off the boat”. By this, the hard-nosed Australian means dispensing with namby-pamby measures of little concern to the average voter (such as minimum pricing and plain packaging) and focusing on people’s core concerns: the economy, immigration, education and welfare reform.

But could Crosby’s motives go beyond the merely political? As the Daily Mirror reports, the strategy chief’s PR and lobbying firm Crosby Textor has long-standing links with the alcohol and tobacco industries. The company was on a retainer with British American Tobacco when cigarette companies fought the introduction of plain packaging by the Australian government and Crosby was federal director of the Liberal Party when it accepted large donations from the industry. Crosby Textor Fullbrook, the UK arm of the firm, has represented tobacco companies since the 1980s.

The company’s links with the alcohol industry are no less notable. The Distilled Spirits Industry Council of Australia, which campaigned against minimum alcohol pricing, is listed as a client of Crosby Textor in a New South Wales register of lobbyists. The trade body includes multinational companies such as Diageo and Bacardi, currently lobbying against a price floor in the UK.

With minimum alcohol pricing and plain cigarette packaging both abandoned in quick succession, some in Westminster are beginning to smell a rat. Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said: “Two public health policies have been dropped since Lynton Crosby arrived. David Cameron needs to come clean about whether Crosby had any involvement in these decisions. From the outside it looks very much like a right-wing lobbyist is dictating the coalition’s public health policy.”

Downing Street has so far refused to say whether it was aware of Crosby’s links to the alcohol and tobacco industries and what role he played in the decision to abandon the measures. But it isn’t just Labour that is sounding the alarm. Sarah Wollaston, the independent-minded Conservative MP for Totnes, and a former GP, tweeted the Mirror’s story with the accompanying words: “Why we desperately need an effective register of lobbyists.