A Conservative donor who has been suspended from the party over allegations of intimidation and inappropriate language spent £50,000 last week on a dinner with Kemi Badenoch, the Guardian has learned.
Rami is the successful bidder for a Ranger dinner at a Tory fundraising event and attends the dinner with a small group of friends, angering those at the party who want him back.
Lord Ranger, who has donated more than £1.5m to the Conservatives since 2009, was suspended in 2023 after complaints about comments he made to an independent journalist and separately about Pakistanis. He was re-admitted in November 2024, but lost his CBE soon afterwards.
He told the Guardian that he was suspended from the party for refusing to apologize 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, will always be based on a 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 Tory party is for money from anywhere.”
The Conservative Party has been contacted for comment.
Ranger made his winning bid at a 1920s-themed event at the five-star Peninsula Hotel in central London. Tables cost up to £10,000 each for the fundraising party, with Tory supporters getting the chance to bid for lots including dinner with Michael Gove, lunch with Jacob Rees-Mogg and a shooting trip with shadow housing secretary James Cleverly.
The event reportedly raised around £220,000 for the party. A lunch with shadow energy secretary Claire Coutinho sold for £10,000 and a round of golf with David Cameron for £2,000.
However, the dinner with Badenoch was extremely popular, attracting bids from several senior donors, according to attendees.
Ranger’s invitation to the event and his successful bid show how much the party has changed its attitude towards him over the past few years. The Guardian revealed in 2022 that Ranger was being investigated by the House of Lords for allegedly threatening and harassing freelance journalist Poonam Joshi.
In a series of tweets, Ranger baselessly accused Joshi’s husband of domestic violence, calling her a “bad woman”, a “total disgrace” and the “epitome of scum and filth”. He threatens to take her to court, “I’ll teach you a lesson.”
Joshi criticized the revelations that the Tories had again received and accepted money from Ranger, calling it “appalling and completely unethical”.
The Lords Commissioner for Standards said he had abused his power by “constantly belittling, humiliating and belittling Ms Joshi”, but decided not to suspend Ranger from Parliament, promising to re-attend a seminar on social media training and the parliamentary code of conduct.
While the investigation was underway, Ranger wrote a letter to the BBC demanding to know “whether your crew of Pakistani descent was involved” in a documentary critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He later apologized and retracted the comments, saying they were “not 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.
As soon as he was reinstated, Ranger was stripped of his CBE, a move he said at the time devastated him. Electoral Commission records show he gave £5,000 to the party in early 2024 during his suspension, but he has not donated since.
