Mark Fullbrook’s role at Downing Street is an unusual one – very unusual

When she ran to become Conservative leader, Liz Truss promised to “deliver, deliver, deliver” and hit the ground running if she got into No 10. In fairness to her, she has: hers is not a government planning to waste any time.

Her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has been in the role for under a month, yet has already delivered a mini-Budget more significant than many of its full fat predecessors. Timid, this administration is not.

It is also heartening to see that eyebrow-raising stories about sleaze have not had to wait until the dying days of the government, as is usually customary. You can thank Mark Fullbrook for that.

Truss’s chief of staff has only been in place for a few weeks and has already been making headlines. You see, his arrangement with Downing Street is, shall we say, an unusual one. Instead of working for the government as an employee, as you’d assume he would, Fullbrook is merely on secondment from his job running a lobbying company – and accordingly paid via said company.

(Were I running this country, I confess I would not take “your premiership looks so shaky that I’d rather not even fully quit the day job to be your most senior adviser” especially well, but that’s a separate issue.)

As the Guardian has now revealed, it is believed that Fullbrook only accepted the position in exchange for a promise that his firm will get to run the next general election campaign for the party. This has already caused some disquiet among Conservative benches, as Fullbrook was the genius behind Zac Goldsmith’s bid for London mayor – which went somewhat less than well.

Amazingly, given that he has only been in No 10 for approximately 17 minutes, this isn’t even the first concerning story to come out of his appointment. Just over a week ago, Fullbrook was found to have been a witness in an FBI investigation.

In his civilian role as a political consultant, he “provided research in 2020 for Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian banker accused of bribing the governor of Puerto Rico around the same time”. The same Herrera Velutini who, as a side note, set up and still largely owns Britannia Financial Services, a company that has given half a million pounds to the Conservative party.

A spokesperson for Fullbrook has denied any wrongdoing, of course, but at risk of coming across as a stern puritan, it still does not feel ideal for a senior government adviser to be interviewed by the FBI. It leads me to question whether these will be the only stories linked to Fullbrook’s life as a lobbyist?

As the Guardian pointed out, for example, his firm “has previously counted as clients Libya’s controversial ‘parliament’, which has twice attempted to overthrow the UN-established government of national unity in Tripoli”. Elsewhere, the Crosby Textor website breezily mentions that Fullbrook “has run over 20 campaigns around the world from the Bahamas to Kazakhstan”.

We do not know what he was up to in Kazakhstan but, given the country’s poor record on human rights and democracy, it feels like an odd addition to what should be a flattering biography.

The parochial point to make here is that in my view Liz Truss probably was wrong to hire Mark Fullbrook as her chief of staff. Advisers making headlines usually isn’t a sign of a government doing well, and this really does feel like it is only the beginning.

To keep up to speed with all the latest opinions and comment sign up to our free weekly Voices Dispatches newsletter by clicking here

A wider question to ask would be: should politicians ever hire lobbyists like Fullbrook? Many former spads and politicians have left Westminster behind to embrace the darker arts in the past, but that is not something that can be stopped.

What could be curtailed is this ability for people to do god knows what for god knows who then go on to help a political party run the country. Politics should at least aim to be a noble pursuit, even if it rarely turns out to be in practice.

It would be a good thing for the country at large and it would be good for the political class as well.

Cynics may argue that said political class doesn’t always hugely care about the former, but they must surely have some degree of self-interest. Do they really want those bad, sleazy headlines to keep coming? If not, believe me: there is an easy solution here.