Businessman who donated £5m to Tories gets knighthood

Mohamed Mansour, a senior treasurer of the Conservative party for just over a year, was one of several surprise recipients of honours on Thursday, with the citation saying it was given for business, charity and political service.

Labour has previously called for the Tories to hand back £5m donated last year by Mansour, who served as transport minister in Egypt under military ruler Hosni Mubarak’s regime in 2005 to 2009 before the Arab spring.

A Downing Street source explained the timing by saying the government had needed to publish a new list of MPs on the privy council, and that this was seen as a chance to recognise people from the worlds of entertainment and AI, as well as politicians and the likes of Mansour, who was being honoured for his charitable works.

Anneliese Dodds, the Labour chair, said: “This is either the arrogant act of an entitled man who’s stopped caring what the public thinks, or the demob-happy self-indulgence of someone who doesn’t expect to be prime minister much longer.

In his recently published autobiography, Drive to Succeed, Mansour wrote of how he ran one of the biggest private companies in the Middle East with 300,000 jobs tied to his business, which “stretches from Cairo to California”.

Davies is considered a rightwinger in the party, and he presented a GB News show jointly with this wife, Esther McVey – also a Conservative MP – until she gave up the role to serve as “minister for common sense” in 2023.