Donor suspended from Tories pays £50,000 for dinner with Kemi Badenoch

A Conservative donor who was suspended from the party after being accused of bullying and inappropriate language spent £50,000 last week to have dinner with Kemi Badenoch, The Guardian has learned.Rami Ranger was the successful bidder for the dinner at a Tory fundraising event and will attend the meal with a small group of friends, infuriating those in the party who believe he should not have been readmitted.Lord Ranger, who has given more than £1.5m to the Conservatives since 2009, was suspended in 2023 after complaints about remarks he had made to an independent journalist, and separately, about Pakistanis. He was readmitted in November 2024, but lost his CBE soon afterwards.He told The Guardian he was suspended from the party because he had refused to apologise to the complainants. “I have been a member of the Conservative Party since 1978, inspired by Edward Heath,” he said. “My support, financial and otherwise, has always been grounded in belief in free trade, enterprise, limited bureaucracy, and Britain’s competitiveness as a trading nation.”Another party backer, however, said: “The rehabilitation of Rami Ranger just shows how desperate this Tory party is for money from anywhere.”The Conservative Party has been approached for comment.Ranger made his successful bid during a 1920s-themed event at the five-star Peninsula hotel in central London. Tables for the fundraising party cost as much as £10,000 each, giving Tory backers the chance to bid for lots including dinner with Michael Gove, lunch with Jacob Rees-Mogg and a shooting trip with the shadow housing secretary, James Cleverly.The event reportedly raised around £220,000 for the party. A lunch with the shadow energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, sold for £10,000 and a round of golf with David Cameron for a rate of £2,000 a hole.The most popular lot, however, was the dinner with Badenoch, which attracted bids from a number of senior donors, according to attendees.Ranger’s invitation to the event and his successful bid show how far the party has shifted in its attitude towards him in the last few years. The Guardian revealed in 2022 that Ranger was under investigation by the House of Lords after being accused of bullying and harassing the freelance journalist Poonam Joshi.In a series of tweets, Ranger made an unfounded allegation that Joshi’s husband was a domestic abuser, called her an “evil woman”, a “total disgrace” and the “epitome of filth and garbage”. He threatened to take her to court, warning: “I will teach you a lesson.”Joshi criticised the revelation about the Tories reintergrating and accepting money from Ranger again, calling it “appalling and totally unethical”.The Lords commissioner for standards ruled he had abused his power by “persistently undermining, humiliating and denigrating Ms Joshi”, but decided not to suspend Ranger from parliament after he promised to undertake social media training and re-attend a seminar on the parliamentary behaviour code.As the investigation was taking place, Ranger wrote a letter to the BBC in which he demanded to know “if your Pakistani-origin staff” had been involved in a documentary critical of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi.He later apologised and withdrew the comments, saying they were “by no means a reflection of how I see the British Pakistani community”, but he was suspended from the party in September 2023 after an internal investigation.Party officials did not announce his suspension, and quietly reinstated him in late 2024, updating the official parliamentary register to show he had previously been suspended.Soon after he was reinstated, Ranger was stripped of his CBE, a move he said at the time had devastated him. Electoral Commission records show he gave £5,000 to the party in early 2024 during his suspension, but that he has not donated since.