Liz Truss raised more than £420,000 in donations for her successful Conservative leadership bid, with the biggest single contribution made by the wife of a former BP executive. Contributions to the new prime minister’s costly campaign were disclosed just minutes before she revealed details of her long-awaited plan to tackle spiralling energy bills. The average donation Truss received was worth £20,000. Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak raised £449,570 for his failed leadership campaign. A spending cap of £300,000 was imposed by Conservative party central office at the start of the contest. Truss registered 21 donations to her campaign, in cash and transport costs. The largest single sum came from Fitriani Hay – the wife of James Hay, who has a luxury goods empire and is a former BP executive. She gifted Truss £100,000. Other supporters included the Tory peer Greville Howard, whose Westminster townhouse was used by her campaign team as a headquarters.
Michael Spencer also gifted £25,000 to Truss at the start of August, one week after giving the same sum to Sunak and two weeks after doing the same for another failed candidate, Penny Mordaunt. Truss accepted £20,000 from Jon Moynihan, a former prominent member of the pro-Brexit Vote Leave campaign who has called for the Electoral Commission to be abolished, along with £10,000 donated by a smoked salmon firm run by former Brexit party MEP Lance Forman. Also revealed in the release by parliament on Thursday was the £23,853 cost for Johnson’s wedding party over the summer, paid for by Anthony and Carole Bamford. The pair run JCB and footed the bill for catering, waiting staff, portable toilets, the hire of a marquee, flowers, an ice cream van, as well as smoke and braai catering, when Johnson and his wife Carrie celebrated their marriage. Truss became the heir of their support, being gifted £5,316 worth of transport costs by JCB at the start of August.
Sunak took £50,000 from Yoginvest Ltd, a firm controlled by property investor Nick Leslau, who gave the Conservatives £20,000 in 2019. Leslau told the Times in November 2020 that he would not be making further donations to the party, angered by the government ban on commercial landlords evicting tenants. At the time he said: “I think the flippancy with which the property industry has been treated has been narrow-minded.”