Report: Bernie Ecclestone Bribed Tony Blair £1m For Tobacco Exemption
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Oct 12, 2008
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair personally intervened to secure Formula 1’s exemption from the tobacco advertising ban, according to the Sunday Telegraph.
After seeing documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, the paper states that Blair took the decision just hours after meeting F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone.
New documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show he demanded a change of policy within hours of a meeting with Ecclestone on October 16, 1997, and his aides went on to blur the truth.
The new documents expose the extent to which he was the driving force behind plans to exempt F1 from Labour’s manifesto pledge to end tobacco sponsorship of sport, pushing a reluctant Department of Health into agreeing. Before Ecclestone’s £1m donation, Labour had planned a universal ban.
Tessa Jowell, a health minister at the time, emerges as having had serious reservations about the move. But a Whitehall memo written on October 31, 1997, states: “The prime minister has made clear his wish to see a permanent exclusion for Formula One from the scope of the tobacco advertising ban.”
The documents show how mandarins warned Blair that he could be misleading MPs over the sequence of events.
Blair defended the plan for a dispensation on the grounds that the ban could lead to big job losses in Britain’s motor racing industry. However, it has emerged that the then Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) cast doubt on this claim. A memo from the DTI to the health department, sent in November 1997 when the government was still trying to decide how to implement the ban, says: “We believe it is unlikely that if F1 should leave the UK there would be an immediate effect on the industry as a whole.”
