David Cameron in talks to join London law firm to advise on geopolitical risks
David Cameron is in talks to join the law firm DLA Piper as a consultant – five years after the Greensill scandal that showed he intensively lobbied officials on behalf of his failing employer.The former prime minister, who also served as foreign secretary last year, is said to be having discussions about taking on an advisory position to help the firm with geopolitical risks.The job would be in addition to Cameron’s existing portfolio of roles, with his current register of interests listing that he works as an adviser to Finback Investment Partners, a private equity firm, and Caxton Associates, a hedge fund.He also chairs the advisory board of a payments firm called PayCargo LLP.It is understood Cameron’s role at DLA Piper, first reported by the Financial Times, would not involve lobbying on behalf of the company, which is the world’s third biggest law firm.
The former prime minister has had a series of jobs since he left No 10 in 2016, including lobbying the government on behalf of a since-collapsed financial firm, Greensill, which led to a scandal over his influence.A parliamentary inquiry by the Treasury committee in 2021 found that it was inappropriate for the ex-prime minister to send 62 messages to former colleagues asking them to help Greensill, for which he worked and in which he owned stock options that could have been worth tens of millions of pounds.The inquiry found he had shown a “significant lack of judgment”.He also worked for a gene-sequencing company, Illumina, which won a £123m government contract during the pandemic; and an AI firm, Afiniti, from which he resigned in 2021.Before he was foreign secretary, Cameron also appeared to have been helping to drum up support for a port project in Sri Lanka, which is part of the flagship belt and road initiative of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping.
Cameron’s office and DLA Piper have been approached for comment.DLA Piper told the FT that discussions were under way and declined to comment further.Separately, the Daily Mail reported on Thursday that Cameron had struggled to buy a Vodafone mobile phone contract for one of his children and there was a suspicion that this was because he was a “politically exposed person” (PEP).The issue came under the spotlight originally when Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader and MP, had his bank account at Coutts closed down because he had been classed as politically exposed.Sign up to Headlines UKGet the day’s headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morningafter newsletter promotionFinancial regulations mean banks and other financial services providers are more reluctant to deal with politicians because they are potential targets for bribery and corruption.
In response to the concerns raised by Cameron’s experience, Farage told the Times: “The prejudice against PEPs is truly appalling,My debanking case exposed this,There are about 90,000 people on the PEP list and that includes people like my children who have been denied things wholly unfairly,The whole thing is an outrage,”The Financial Conduct Authority issued a warning last year to banks that they must do more to make sure politicians and their families are treated more fairly and not denied services.
Who is calling the shots when it comes to UK wage levels: workers or bosses?
When Eastbourne’s refuse collectors secured a huge 11% pay rise, increasing to 19% for the lowest paid, it seemed like worker power was back.It was early 2022 and inflation was rocketing on its way to a peak of 11%. In a desperate scramble to keep pace with rising prices to protect their incomes, workers across the UK’s public and private sectors took widescale industrial action in a way that brought back memories of the 1970s. What followed was a series of pay deals thrashed out between bosses and employees, with unions often arguing they had been due pay increases for years.Now, a similar scenario is playing out, though this time by stealth
‘New dawn’: first train service renationalised under Starmer begins
Ministers have hailed a “new dawn” for Britain’s railways as the first train services renationalised under the Labour government started operating on Sunday.The 6.14 from London Waterloo to Shepperton was due to be the first rebranded train out on Sunday, its carriages adorned with a union jack and the logo “Great British Railways: coming soon” as part of a publicly owned South Western Railway (SWR).However, the very first renationalised SWR service was in fact set to involve a rail replacement bus: the 5.36 from Woking to Waterloo having to terminate at Surbiton because of bank holiday weekend engineering works
Valuable tool or cause for alarm? Facial ID quietly becoming part of police’s arsenal
The future is coming at Croydon fast. It might not look like Britain’s cutting edge but North End, a pedestrianised high street lined with the usual mix of pawn shops, fast-food outlets and branded clothing stores, is expected to be one of two roads to host the UK’s first fixed facial recognition cameras.Digital photographs of passersby will be silently taken and processed to extract the measurements of facial features, known as biometric data. They will be immediately compared by artificial intelligence to images on a watchlist. Matches will trigger alerts
Live facial recognition cameras may become ‘commonplace’ as police use soars
Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become “commonplace” in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year.A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing.Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches.Live facial recognition involves the matching of faces caught on surveillance camera footage against a police watchlist in real time, in what campaigners liken to the continual finger printing of members of the public as they go about their daily lives.Retrospective facial recognition software is used by the police to match images on databases with those caught on CCTV and other systems
‘I am free and happy’: Daria Kasatkina has no regrets ahead of first grand slam as Australian | Simon Cambers
When Daria Kasatkina announced that she had officially switched allegiance from Russia to Australia, she picked up her phone soon after to be greeted with whoops of delight from another Australian player, Daria Saville.“I was not telling anyone before it came out,” Kasatkina says to Guardian Australia on the eve of the 2025 French Open. “Dasha called me straightaway and she was so excited. She was so happy for me and I felt so happy because she was super-happy for me.“It was so natural and now we’re real neighbours
Co-driver dies after crash during Jim Clark rally in Scotland
A co-driver taking part in the Jim Clark rally in Scotland has died after a crash on Saturday morning.Dai Roberts, 39, was pronounced dead at the scene near Duns in the Scottish Borders.The driver, James Williams, 27, was taken to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh with serious but not life-threatening injuries.The rally’s organisers, the Jim Clark Memorial Motor Club, said the remainder of the event and Sunday’s Jim Clark Reivers rally had been cancelled.The Jim Clark rally is an annual closed-road motor sport race named after the late Formula One champion Jim Clark, who was killed in an accident in Hockenheim, Germany, in 1968
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