CMC tycoon Cruddas hands £50,000 to Johnson leadership bid

Boris Johnson has been handed £50,000 by Peter Cruddas, one of the City's leading figures, as he seeks to blow rivals away financially and rebuild his standing among employers in the race for the Conservative Party leadership.

Sky News has learnt that Mr Cruddas, the founder and chief executive of financial spread-betting firm CMC Markets, wrote the five-figure cheque to Mr Johnson's campaign earlier this week.

The donation swells Mr Johnson's coffers days after he held a private breakfast with wealthy potential backers at a private members' club in London's Mayfair.

Sources say the former foreign secretary used the event to seek to rebuild his credentials as a pro-business candidate, even as the furore about comments he made about the private sector's antipathy to a no-deal Brexit continues to reverberate through the Tory leadership contest.

Mr Johnson is understood to have outlined an ambition to cut stamp duty and oversee steeper-than-planned cuts to corporation tax if he becomes prime minister, according to insiders.

The race to build campaign warchests has already seen the dozen candidates collectively raise hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Under the rules of the contest, candidates can spend a maximum of £150,000 between today and the date of the new leader's election - as revealed by Sky News earlier this week .

Any surplus funds raised by individual candidates will be returned to party coffers, providing Tory finances with a welcome boost at a time when disputes over Theresa May's handling of Brexit have caused a sharp fall in donations.

Sources said that Mr Johnson had been discussing raising a total of as much as £500,000 to fund his campaign - some of which will already have been spent ahead of the opening on Friday of the spending window.

The first round of voting will take place next Thursday.

Insiders said other big donors to Mr Johnson's campaign included the JCB owner Lord Bamford, who is said to have pledged a six-figure sum, and Jamie Reuben, an entrepreneur who is a significant investor in property assets and technology companies.

The £50,000 given by Mr Cruddas, who has also served as Tory treasurer and been a substantial donor to the party, reflects his belief that Mrs May's successor needs to be someone committed to implementing the result of the 2016 EU referendum.

I'm going to give him some money and back him," the CMC founder told Bloomberg News on Thursday.

"I think we need a Brexiteer as our next prime minister.

"The country voted to leave the European Union and I think we should have someone that delivered that, and it should be someone like Boris Johnson."

One of the City's most successful self-made businessmen, Mr Cruddas served as Tory treasurer until 2012, when his term was brought to an abrupt end by a newspaper story for which he successfully sued for libel.

Mr Cruddas declined to comment on the size of his donation to Mr Johnson on Friday, while a spokesman for Mr Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr Johnson alarmed the business community last year when he responded "**** business" to protests about the prospective impact of a no-deal Brexit on the British economy.

Matt Hancock, the health and social care secretary, told the Financial Times last month: "To the people who say '**** business', I say **** '**** business'."

Some of Mr Johnson's rivals for the Tory leadership have also raised substantial sums of money.

Paul Marshall, a hedge fund manager, is understood to have given £10,000 to Michael Gove in recent days, while Jeremy Hunt - Mr Johnson's successor as foreign secretary - has also been backed by leading City figures such as Andrew Law, who runs another hedge fund manager.