ANNA MIKHAILOVA: Mordaunt is not getting a dime from this oligarch Tory donor

Oligarch and prominent Tory donor Alexander Temerko is ‘torn’ between support Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss for Prime Minister, says former Welsh Minister Alun Cairns, after I saw him casually strolling through Parliament with the businessman on Friday.

However, there is one candidate that Temerko will certainly not support, and that is Penny Mordaunt. He threw a telltale tantrum in January when he called the Commerce Secretary an “absolutely uncontrollable woman” and a “threat to national security.”

The latter is a bit rich from a man who used to make weapons for the Russian army and a Minister of Defence under Boris Yeltsin, before shifting his allegiance to another Boris (Johnson) who was ravaged with integrity.

Mordaunt’s crime was to oppose a £1.2 billion underwater cable project by Temerko’s company, Aquind.

The Portsmouth North MP went on to suggest in the House of Commons that the Tories should stop taking money from the oligarch after his unsavory outburst, adding: “Bullies should not be tolerated.”

Cairns didn’t seem to get the message, saying he invited the former director of Russian oil giant Yukos to the House of Commons last week to talk about Ukraine.

Temerko, now a Putin critic, and Aquind have given more than £1 million to the Tories, including Cairns. The donor can regularly be seen in photos at fundraisers with prime ministers and their cabinets. I remember a cabinet minister who took the Temerko ruble and told me he wanted nothing in return, just friendly table companions. That logically explains the oligarch’s anger at Mordaunt’s resistance to his business plans.

So who will Penny take a dime from then? She used Friday’s leadership debate to emphasize that she had spoken out against ‘some ways we’ [Conservatives] be financed’.

But despite repeatedly asking her team to explain what Mordaunt meant — will she overhaul the Tory donor just train, for example — sadly, no response came. However, I’ve heard that at least one Leader’s Group member (£50,000 annual donation required to qualify) would like to chat on PM4PM.

Did Rishi Sunak give away the game on a leadership hunt? When asked what his biggest weakness was, Sunak actually said it was too much of a perfectionist.

“You have to make sure you don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” he explained. Westminster aficionados will know that this is a favorite phrase of the man Sunak is eager to distance himself from: one Michael Gove.

While Lord (Bernard) Hogan-Howe waits to see if kissing Boris Johnson’s ring will earn him the National Crime Agency job, the disastrous former Met commissioner has taken his 18th paid gig – just in case.

Hogan-Howe (uninvestigated) was in charge of the bungled VIP child abuse Operation Midland and, individually, failed to discover why the Met was “massively shredding” police corruption files. Just the man with the right natural intelligence to become a business development consultant to Mind Foundry, an Oxford-based artificial intelligence company that manages government data.

Tom Tugendha’s promised ‘clean start’ includes Daniel Korski being included in his leadership opportunity. He is David Cameron’s former senior aide who was embroiled in the Uber lobbying campaign unveiled by this newspaper well before the data dump that was repackaged by The Guardian this week. Korski led secret talks between ministers and then-London Mayor Boris Johnson, which allayed Uber’s fears of losing its license to operate in the capital.

Korski then established a technology fund focused on public sector work and was given a seat on government councils from Matt Hancock of the Department of Health and Liz Truss of the Department of International Trade. What a clean start.

Meanwhile, Truss has brought Jason Stein to her team. He was a Tory adviser during the Theresa May era who left in 2019 to lead Prince Andrew’s battle over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. That went well.