A businessman and former Egyptian government minister who donated £5m to the Conservative party last year has unexpectedly been given a knighthood on the recommendation of Rishi Sunak. Mohamed Mansour, a senior treasurer of the Conservative party for just over a year, was one of several surprise recipients of honours on Thursday, with the citation saying it was given for business, charity and political service. Labour has previously called for the Tories to hand back £5m donated last year by Mansour, who served as transport minister in Egypt under military ruler Hosni Mubarak’s regime in 2005 to 2009 before the Arab spring. The opposition called for Sunak to return the donation last year after it emerged one of Mansour’s family companies had still been operating in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. The firm, Mantrac, said in May 2023 that it was winding down its business in Russia, more than a year after Moscow’s war drew international condemnation and calls from Sunak and Boris Johnson for businesses to withdraw. Mansour was joined in receiving a knighthood by Demis Hassabis, founder of artificial intelligence company DeepMind, and by film-making couple Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas, who will receive a knighthood and a damehood. American businessman Ted Sarandos, the co-chief of Netflix, was given an honorary knighthood.
Backbench MP Philip Davies, and Mark Spencer, a former chief whip under Johnson, were also knighted, while Tracey Crouch, a former minister, was made a dame along with Treasury committee chair Harriett Baldwin. The move to award a series of honours before the Easter recess may renew speculation that Sunak is weighing whether to call a summer election. A Downing Street source explained the timing by saying the government had needed to publish a new list of MPs on the privy council, and that this was seen as a chance to recognise people from the worlds of entertainment and AI, as well as politicians and the likes of Mansour, who was being honoured for his charitable works. There was, the source added, precedent for honours to be awarded outside the usual timetable of political awards, or the new year or monarch’s birthday lists. Anneliese Dodds, the Labour chair, said: “This is either the arrogant act of an entitled man who’s stopped caring what the public thinks, or the demob-happy self-indulgence of someone who doesn’t expect to be prime minister much longer. Either way, it shows a blatant disrespect for the office he should feel privileged to hold.” Mansour set up his family office, Man Capital, in London in 2010, after his stint as transport minister under Mubarak. In his recently published autobiography, Drive to Succeed, Mansour wrote of how he ran one of the biggest private companies in the Middle East with 300,000 jobs tied to his business, which “stretches from Cairo to California”. He wrote: “The UK has given me a second home and security, as well as a sanctuary and base to foster a global business … I was so honoured to be appointed as senior treasurer of the UK Conservative party in December 2022. “The party of [Winston] Churchill is a great political movement and one of the oldest political parties in the world and it gives me enormous pride to serve.” Davies, the MP for Shipley since 2005, told the PA news agency: “Obviously I’m absolutely delighted. I’m somewhat flabbergasted as well, to be honest. “It feels very surreal and I’m somewhat in shock … I’m just immensely grateful to everybody who has enabled it to happen.” Davies is considered a rightwinger in the party, and he presented a GB News show jointly with this wife, Esther McVey – also a Conservative MP – until she gave up the role to serve as “minister for common sense” in 2023. Last year, broadcast regulator Ofcom found that GB News breached impartiality rules when the pair interviewed the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, before that year’s spring budget in what was described as a “love-in”. Davies is a longstanding campaigner for men’s rights and a critic of “militant feminists” and political correctness. He also has been a leading advocate for the gambling industry in parliament.