Pyramid of Lies: The Prime Minister, the Banker and the Billion Pound Scandal

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The Cameron government’s endorsement mattered commercially. Whitehall awarded Greensill contracts “for projects Greensill had proposed when working in Whitehall”. Greensill used the CBE the Conservatives gave him as a quality assurance mark, and in 2018 bagged the former prime minister himself.

Andrew Gimson, the Spectator’s then foreign editor, was also Johnson’s first biographer. He remembers his boss was already being talked about as a contender for the party leadership when Howard – always intended to be a caretaker – stepped aside. “In 2005, Boris found he couldn’t run for the leadership; he had been shown to be too unreliable. It was his connection with the Spectator that did for him. He hated the fact that [David] Cameron won, but he had got himself in a hopeless position with Petronella, where he couldn’t keep everybody happy,” Gimson said. Modern corruption is a refined process for sophisticated people. Urbane actors enter the political equivalent of a “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) agreement. Politicians or civil servants grant a shady financial institution or incompetent arms manufacturer access to decision-making and public money. No agreement needs to have been reached. No wads of cash change hands. But after the civil servant retires or politician leaves parliament, he can expect an immensely rewarding job. The sole benefit of the multibillion collapse of Greensill Capital in 2021 was that it illuminated BNPL politics as no other scandal has. Barlow’s American assistant, Cameron, is described as having “a deep and sexist reverence for men who really knew stuff”. He wrote: “It amazed her sometimes how little appearances mattered. He could be bald, he could be spindly or sweaty or tubby, but if the man’s disquisition had enough interest, fluency and authority, it would speak directly to her groin.”

NATHAN HUNT: Duncan, you've been following the Greensill story for years. I'm wondering how early did you know that this story wasn't going to end well? Work on the flat above No 11 began in April 2020, while the Prime Minister was in hospital with Covid. Reports at the time suggested his wife, Carrie Symonds, was horrified at the “John Lewis furniture nightmare” left behind by the Prime Minister’s predecessor, Theresa May, though she has denied the claims.

If we can pull off [a public listing]”, Lex Greensill says in early 2020, “me and my brother will be the richest men in Australia”; just over a year later, he tells one of his major shareholders, “It’s over... I’m ashamed for what I’ve done to my family name”. As ever, the dream dies gradually, then suddenly. So the biggest trade credit insurers said, no, we're not going to work with you. That left him with a bit of a problem, which he solves by going to a very small Australian insurer called The Bond & Credit Co. And The Bond & Credit Co. ended up providing billions and billions of dollars of insurance to the Greensill business. And it was startling to me, looking at it as a journalist to say, this can't be right, how can this tiny company be so critical in these billions of dollars worth of funds. Three years later he was forced to apologise for an article in the magazine which suggested that “drunken fans” were partially to blame for the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, and which suggested that Liverpudlians were wallowing in their “victim status”. Speaking of his wife, Pullen said: “Maggie was always surprised that the ladies of Henley didn’t criticise him for his affairs. In fact, most of them would always say that it was Marina’s fault.”

Lex Greensill had a simple, billion-dollar idea - democratising supply chain finance. Suppliers want to get their invoices paid as soon as possible. Companies want to hold off as long as they can. Greensill bridged the two, it's mundane, boring even, but he saw an opportunity to profit. However, margins are thin and Lex, ever the risk taker, made lucrative loans with other people's money: to a Russian cargo plane linked to Vladmir Putin, to former Special Forces who ran a private army, and crucially to companies that were fraudulent or had no revenue. And in that case, there's a few million dollars of maybe somebody who has got a little bit more than that has been poured into these funds, which have been sold as ultrasafe, but in fact, they aren't really. They're full of risky loans. And so Credit Suisse played a really important role in fueling Greensill Capital growth, but also spreading the risk to people who didn't understand what they were getting into. Pressed on the issue during a Q&A session with journalists, Mr Johnson said: “I didn’t say anything about Turkey in the referendum … Since I made no remarks, I can’t disown them.” Wallpapergate Carrie Symonds was reportedly horrified at the ‘John Lewis furniture nightmare’ left behind by the Prime Minister’s predecessor, Theresa May, though she has denied the claims (Photo: Reuters) And there would be some sort of implausible excuse given. A very, very difficult firm to deal with. And I suppose that was probably one of the biggest red flags, right, that if somebody is so desperate not to tell you the truth, not to answer your questions, even questions which seem pretty straightforward, then that's a real red flag. If you've got a genuine business that's genuinely growing faster that is being done in a very honest and well organized and well structured way, then you're probably fine answering difficult questions from journalists. But if you've got a business which fundamentally is not doing what it's supposed to, then that's always going to be a difficult relationship. In the centuries since, factoring became part of the supply chains that grew around the world, oiled by liquidity. As these operations became faster and more complex they needed not just factoring but reverse factoring, in which people sell their debt, rather than their credit, and each agent in the chain is paid straight away. The process became computerised, and modern global trade now runs on a silent river of digitised debt.