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

A Conservative donor who was suspended from the party after being accused of bullying and using inappropriate language spent £50,000 on dinner with Kemi Badenoch last week, the Guardian has learned.

Rami Ranger was the successful bidder for the dinner at the Conservative Party fundraiser and will attend the dinner with a small group of friends, infuriating those in the party who believe he should not be readmitted.

Lord Ranger, who has donated more than £1.5 million to the Conservatives since 2009, was suspended from office in 2023 following complaints about comments he made to an independent journalist and also about Pakistanis. He was readmitted in November 2024, but lost his CBE soon after.

He told the Guardian he was suspended from the party after refusing to apologize to complainants. “I have been a member of the Conservative party since 1978, inspired by Edward Heath,” he said. “My support, fiscal and otherwise, has always been based on my belief in free trade, enterprise, limited bureaucracy and Britain’s competitiveness as a trading nation.”

But another party supporter said: “Rami Ranger’s rehabilitation shows how desperate this Conservative party is to get money from anywhere.”

The Conservative Party has been approached for comment.

Ranger made its successful bid during a 1920s-themed event at the five-star Peninsula hotel in central London. Tables for the fundraising party cost up to £10,000 each, giving Tory supporters the chance to bid, including dinner with Michael Gove, lunch with Jacob Rees-Mogg and a shooting tour with shadow housing secretary James Cleverly.

Activity reportedly upgraded Around £220,000 for the party. A lunch with shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho sold for £10,000, while a round of golf with David Cameron sold for £2,000 a hole.

But the most popular party, according to attendees, was the dinner with Badenoch, who received offers from a number of high-profile donors.

Ranger’s invitation to the event and his successful bid show how much the party’s attitude towards him has changed over the last few years. The Guardian revealed in 2022 that Ranger was under investigation by the House of Lords after he was accused of bullying and harassing freelance journalist Poonam Joshi.

In a series of tweets, Ranger made a false claim that Joshi’s husband was a domestic abuser, calling her an “evil woman”, “an utter disgrace” and “the epitome of filth and garbage”. He threatened to take her to court and warned, “I will teach you a lesson.”

Joshi criticized the statement about the Conservatives regrouping and accepting money from Ranger again, calling it “appalling and completely unethical”.

The Lords Standards Commissioner ruled that she had abused her power by “persistently undermining, belittling and belittling Ms Joshi”, but decided not to suspend Ranger from parliament after she promised to undergo social media training and re-attend a seminar on the parliamentary code of conduct.

While the investigation was ongoing, Ranger wrote to the BBC asking whether “your staff of Pakistani origin” had appeared in a documentary criticizing Indian prime minister Narendra Modi.

He later apologized and retracted the comments, saying they “in no way reflect how I view the British Pakistani community”, but was suspended from the party in September 2023 following an internal investigation.

Party officials did not announce his suspension and quietly reinstated him in late 2024, updating official parliamentary records to show that he had been previously suspended.

Ranger was stripped of his CBE shortly after he was reinstated, a move he said devastated him at the time. Electoral Commission records show he gave £5,000 to the party in early 2024, when he was suspended from office, but has not donated since.