Peter Gummer, Baron Chadlington

In September 1996 Gummer became chairman of the Royal Opera House (RHO).[24] He had previously chaired the Arts Council's lottery panel, which had issued £78.5 million to the ROH. According to Dan Glaister, arts editor at The Guardian, public perception was that Chadlington had "written a cheque, walked around the table and pocketed it".[22] Under Chadlington's leadership, there was also a turnover of senior staff, including Jeremy Isaacs and his replacement as house director Genista McIntosh - the latter of whom lasted four months,[22] citing ill-health as the reason for her departure, although there were rumours that she had been driven out by Chadlington and another board member, Vivien Duffield, because she wanted to lower ticket prices to attached a new audience.[48] Later, it emerged McIntosh objected to liberties members of the board were taking, using their privilege to, for instance, rearranged the casting for the ballet for the nights when they were bringing guests.[48] Chadlington appointed his friend and former colleague at the Arts Council Mary Allen as McIntosh's replacement, but the position had not been advertised.[48] When secretary-general of the Arts Council, Allen had authorised the award of £78 million of lottery money to the RHO.[48] The RHO made £750,000 deficit in two months of its 1997 touring programme.[22] A number of reports commented on outdated practices and poor management at the RHO.[48] Chadlington didn't appoint a financial director for a year and the RHO did not keep regular accounts; the RHO was in £7 million of debt.[5] In July 1997, the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, led by Gerald Kaufman, opened an investigation into the management of the RHO. The committee released its report in December 1997, which described the management of the Royal Opera House as "abysmal" with "incompetence, disastrous financial planning and misjudgement". Gummer resigned that month.[5]

In 2007, Chadlington helped senior figures from several large private equity firms prepare for an appearance before the Treasury Select Committee, which was investigating the activities of the private equity industry. The peer, a PR expert, did not lodge a contact with the House of Lords for this work for Permira, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, 3i and the Carlyle Group, which was in breach of the Lords Code of Conduct.[30]

In 2010, then culture secretary Jeremy Hunt gave Chadlington's daughter, Naomi, a civil service post in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Doing so was considered by people in Whitehall as "highly unusual" and "not normal" and Hunt was criticized for giving the role to a close business associate (between 2000 and 2004, Chadlington was director of Hotcourses, a company Hunt founded), a major donor to the Tory party (Chadlington having given more than £77,000 to the Tories between 2005 and 2010), and one of prime minister David Cameron's political allies (as president of Witney Conservative association, Cameron's constituency, Chadlington was a major supporter of Cameron's campaign to become Tory leader in 2005). The appointment came weeks after the government announced there would be a freeze on hiring in the civil service. Mark Serwotka, the leader of the PCS union, which represents civil servants, questioned whether the appointment was made because of "nepotism and privilege".[34]

In 2011, Chadlington sold land to the then prime minister David Cameron. The previous year, Chadlington had bought a property adjoining Cameron's constituency home and the property remained empty.[32][12] Initially, Chadlington offered the land to Cameron[45] but then sold land to him for £137,000, the market rate plus extra to allow for the increase in value the land would bring to Cameron's home.[32][49] The newly bought land increased the value of Cameron's property by approximately £250,000.[32] In the opinion of Sir Alistair Graham, former chairman of the Committee of Standards in Public Life, Cameron should have declared the transaction to parliament's registry of interest as Chadlington was the head of one of the largest lobbying firms in the country.[32][1] The year before the transaction, Cameron's government had pledged to crack down on lobbying, with Cameron making a speech that it was time to shine "the light of transparency onto lobbying in our country" and force "our politics to come clean about who is buying power and influence".[32][1] Downing Street said there was no need for the sale to be listed in the registry of interests because there was a land registry record from the transaction that already put it into the public public domain.[1] Chadlington said, "To avoid any perception of a conflict, we instructed an independent surveyor to value the garages and land. We did not negotiate on price – the Prime Minister paid the market rate as recommended by the surveyor."[1]

In 2017, David Cameron lobbied the Chinese government on behalf of Chadlington in order to establish a £500 million private investment fund.[33] Chadlington, who initiated[50] and was the main driver behind the fund,[16] had been working on the fund for three years and travelled to China with Cameron,[51] where the former prime minister met with Ma Kai, a Chinese vice-premier who headed Beijing's finance ministry, to discuss the proposal.[51][52] Cameron had also lobbied the then British chancellor, Philip Hammond, about setting up the fund.[53] Cameron's meetings with Ma and Hammond did not break any parliamentary rules and did not have to be cleared with the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments because the fund had not yet been set up.[51][53] They did, however, raise questions about the robustness of parliamentary lobbying rules, which usually ban former ministers from lobbying for two years,[16][54] with Peter Dowd, then shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, commenting, "it appears the former prime minister's status and personal relationships have allowed him ministerial contact without having to go through adequate motions of transparency".[53]

In 2020, Chadlington gave SG Recruitment chief executive and owner David Sumner the email address of Lord Andrew Feldman, who was advisor to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) during the early stages of the government response to the covid-19 pandemic. Feldman referred the company, which recruited nurses for the NHS from countries overseas,[55] to the "VIP lane" that gave priority to politically connected firms offering personal protective equipment (PPE). SG Recruitment (later renamed Sumner Group Health Limited[56]) was awarded two government contracts, worth £50 million, to supply PPE. Chadlington, listed by the DHSC as the "source of referral" for SG Recruitment's referral to the governement,[57] was also a director and shareholder of SG Recruitment's parent company, Sumner Group Holdings.[58][59] At the time of Chadlington's referral, SG Recruitment was "a small, loss-making company that supplied healthcare workers to the NHS, and appears to have had no experience providing PPE", with its parent company having faced recent financial difficulties (it liquidated in October 2022).[60]

In January 2022, following a challenge from the Good Law Project, the "VIP lane" was ruled unlawful as it gave unequal treatment to companies by the government.[58] In May 2022, the House of Lords standards committee announced an investigation into Chadlington for "alleged involvement in procuring contracts for SG Recruitment UK", leading to potential breaches of two rules in peers' code of conduct: that peers must not accept or agree to accept "payment or other incentive or reward in return for providing parliamentary advice or services", and that peers "must not seek by parliamentary means to confer exclusive benefit" on a company in which they have a financial interest.[58] In July 2022, Chadlington was cleared of lobbying for the contracts as he had not directly approached the government about SG Recruitment. Following the ruling, the Labour party called for a review of the Lords watchdog's rules, Labour peer George Foulkes commenting that the ruling "indicates that the code needs revision to take account of more subtle approaches."[61]

In July 2023, the Lords standards committee opened a new inquiry into Chadlington, reinvestigating potential breaches of lobbying rules, following potential discrepancies between accounts from Chadlington and from his lawyers regarding the extent of Chadlington's involvement in government procurement of PPE through SG Recruitment.[62] Foulkes, who called for the reinvestigation, said the standards commissioner should also investigate whether Chadlington had misled the watchdog.[63] In 2023, the governement were in dispute with SG Recruitment over one of its contracts, a source telling The Guardian some of the PPE had allegegly not been supplied and some was substandard.[60]