Rouble trouble doesn’t faze Ben Elliott

Ben Elliot may be facing calls from Tory MPs to quit as their party’s co-chair over the roubles he’s been trousering from dodgy Russian oligarchs, but that has not put the former Today editor Sarah Sands off going into business with him.

Sands, who presided first over the London Evening Standard, when it championed Boris Johnson for mayor, and, later Radio 4’s Today, when it was widely derided for its pro-Brexit bias, is to go into partnership with the PM’s Old Etonian mate and the nephew of the Duchess of Cornwall in an outfit called Braemar Events.

Sands has also been appointed to the board of a PR firm called Hawthorn that Elliot co-founded apparently with the intention of expanding the Braemar Summit – an event dubbed “McDavos” in a piece Rachel Johnson wrote for the Daily Mail – which is held each September in the Cairngorms. Sands and Hawthorn CEO John Evans set up and part-funded it. Its website shows the likes of Zac Goldsmith, Kwasi Kwarteng and Today’s Mishal Husain holding forth at last year’s event.

Braemar Events – incorporated as a company earlier this month – is 20% owned by Elliot, with Sands and Evans taking 40% each. Hawthorn itself has done rather well of late – almost doubling its retained earnings between March 2020 and March 2021, with £1,078,612 in shareholder funds reported in its latest accounts.

There are no up-to-date figures, meanwhile, for Elliot’s controversial lifestyle business Quintessentially (UK) – so beloved by the oligarchs – with its 2020 financial statements long overdue. On Elliot’s watch at Tory HQ, £2m worth of donations were gleefully accepted from donors linked to Putin.