The government has been accused of “looking after their own” after choosing a former Tory party candidate with links to a rightwing thinktank as its preferred candidate for the chair of the charities’ watchdog.
Labour said by seeking to appoint Orlando Fraser, a founding fellow of the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), to the chair of the Charity Commission, ministers had ignored due process in favour of another Conservative supporter.
There was also a lukewarm response to the choice from the charity sector, with the National Council for Voluntary Organisations saying it was “disappointed” ministers had failed to appoint someone “with full political independence”.
Fraser is likely to be subjected to a grilling when he appears before the parliamentary committee set up to scrutinise public appointments in the next few weeks. The committee is already furious about what it has called the “shambles” of an appointment process that has seen the commission without a chair for a year.
Labour’s shadow culture secretary, Lucy Powell MP, said: “The chair of the Charity Commission is an important post, and the public must have confidence that this role is independent, not party political, and that there is no conflict of interest in investigations the Commission carries out. Instead, this is another case of the Tories looking after their own.”
The culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, opted for Fraser after her previous choice, Martin Thomas, resigned four days before he was due to take up post in December after a controversy surrounding his past stewardship of a women’s charity. She appears not to have reopened the appointment process before appointing Fraser.
The charity watchdog role was pulled into a “culture wars” political controversy last year after the previous culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, said its next chair should be prepared to pursue charities which stray into so-called “woke” and “political” activities.
Fraser was on the board of the Charity Commission from 2013-17 under Sir William Shawcross when it attracted criticism from the charity sector over its perceived politicisation. Several members of the board were said to have close links to Tory MPs and rightwing thinktanks.
In 2016 Fraser was named in a court case after the commission’s attempt to prevent UK charitable foundations from funding Cage, a lobby group supporting people accused of terrorism, was challenged. The commission withdrew its attempted prohibition, with Cage arguing the regulator had overstepped its regulatory powers.
Fraser, a commercial barrister, stood unsuccessfully for the Conservative party in north Devon in 2005. He subsequently helped draw up the CSJ’s Breakdown Britain report, which became an inspiration for Tory policy on the voluntary sector. He has not declared any party political activity in the past five years.
Educated at Ampleforth school and Cambridge University, Fraser is the son of the author Lady Antonia Fraser and the late Tory MP Sir Hugh Fraser. His stepfather was the playwright Harold Pinter and his grandfather the late prison reformer and Labour peer Lord Longford. He is married to Clemmie Hambro, a great-granddaughter of Winston Churchill.