
The best way to tour the grand houses of Kensington and Bayswater is from the top deck of a bus. Slow traffic and a high vantage point allow anyone to peer through the tall windows and admire the cream carpets and plump furniture within. In most of these richly appointed rooms, the lights are off.
In the parks there is life: professional dog-walkers handle six or eight hounds apiece, hedge-fund pooches that curl up at the feet of the 1 per cent. No one around here walks their own dog. A fat corgi bustled past on his way, it seemed, to an important meeting. The streets vibrated with the sound of drills and leaf-blowers, but it is hard to say for whom all this maintenance is being done. The houses keep their secrets close. Thousands are owned by anonymous trusts in places like the British Virgin Islands.
Joe Powell was elected as the local Labour MP last year, a newcomer to parliament in a new constituency (Kensington and Bayswater was created by boundary changes from parts of the old Kensington, Westminster North, and Chelsea and Fulham seats). While he was campaigning he was approached by a woman who had been brought to the UK to work. She had never seen the owners of the large house she cleaned, only an intermediary, who had taken her passport away and paid her less than the legal minimum wage. Beyond the manicured gardens, Powell told me, there is an “underbelly” of modern slavery, illicit finance and social problems. Around 6,500 houses in the constituency are owned offshore, many through trusts and shell companies.
“It hollows out in the community. It means good local businesses shut. It’s quiet at night, and there are safety aspects to that.” It’s hard to supply an area with police officers or teachers when none of them can afford to live nearby; the average rental property in the area costs more than £40,000 per year.
Powell’s is the richest constituency in Britain, but it is also a place of extreme inequality. More than half the children who live in it are privately educated, but the bulk of Powell’s casework as an MP concerns poor-quality private rented and social housing. He represents four of the most expensive streets in the country – but also estates such as Lancaster Road, site of Grenfell Tower. Kensington has never been cheap, but home ownership there is now out of reach to most. “People that may have bought their houses in say, the early Nineties – they would be successful, professional people,” said Powell. “But their children, who might be in similar jobs to them – lawyers, people working in the City – they absolutely cannot afford to live here.” This shift has happened because today overseas investors use the constituency as a store of value. It is not just the mega-mansions that concern Powell, but the blocks of new flats that are sold “off plan”, before they’re built, to investors. “Some of it is foreign pension funds, but a lot of it would be, let’s say, a middle-ranking member of the Chinese parliament, who is effectively buying a safe deposit box in London.”
What happens in Kensington’s property market is not just a local problem, however, and Powell is not just a local MP. He is also chair of the all-party parliamentary group on anti-corruption and responsible tax. The largest houses there are examples of how illicit finance and kleptocracy store their money in London. He shows me Roman Abramovich’s old house, across the road from Kensington Palace, which the Russian-Israeli oligarch bought for £90m in 2011. It has since become a frozen asset. “We thought it could be used by Ukrainian refugees,” Powell smiled.
Half a mile away is an immaculately maintained (and deserted) private square. Powell said three of the properties here are owned, through trusts in the British Virgin Islands, by the Aliyev family, who have ruled Azerbaijan as a dictatorship since 1993 and who have been accused of war crimes and ethnic cleansing. These properties may be used by family members for shopping trips, but their main purpose is to be worth tens of millions of pounds – money that Powell said very likely “should be for the people of Azerbaijan”.
A recent investigation by the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International identified almost £6bn in property in the UK that has been bought using suspicious funds since 2016 – over £1bn of it in Kensington and Bayswater. This is probably only part of the picture.
Powell grew up not far from his constituency, in Queen’s Park, north-west London. He studied at Cambridge and then completed a master’s in Uganda, where he saw political corruption first hand. In the capital, Kampala, new security cameras had been installed for a summit of Commonwealth leaders, but at the police command centre, the screens were blank. “None of them were connected,” he recalled, “they hadn’t used any of it.” The security minister had intervened in the procurement process, and the funds had been misspent – “in a place where people were dying in childbirth, or of entirely preventable diseases, and which, at the same time, was a significant recipient of UK aid money”.
Powell joined the Open Government Partnership, a multinational organisation promoting transparency and anti-corruption. David Cameron was a co-founder, so Powell was dismayed when the former prime minister was revealed to have lobbied for the financial services company Greensill. During the Boris Johnson era he saw “the billions wasted on procurement and bounce-back loans, and the [questionable] House of Lords appointments”. The turning point for Powell was the war in Ukraine, and a gleaming building on Kensington High Street. It contains a flat that was sold in 2016 for £4.4m to a 21-year-old with no mortgage. The buyer was Polina Kovaleva, whose mother is reportedly the mistress of Sergei Lavrov, Vladimir Putin’s minister of foreign affairs. “I just felt: that’s not acceptable.”
Plutocracy has only become more of a problem since that moment. Elon Musk, who spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars helping get Donald Trump elected, has since begun to intervene in British politics, threatening to donate a sum to Reform that would overshadow the resources of other parties. Powell said this raises the “urgent problem” of political donations in the UK, which are regulated by little more than good faith. “There are plenty of people who see the UK system as very open to manipulation. I am not at all confident that we have the enforcement mechanisms in place for people that don’t want to play by the rules.”
The Labour government’s record on anti-corruption has so far proved patchy, and there are no plans for new legislation on political donations. Tulip Siddiq, the Treasury minister responsible for countering financial crime, money laundering and illicit finance, resigned on 14 January after her financial connections to her aunt – who is suspected of corruption in Bangladesh – were revealed. Siddiq lived for years in a Hampstead flat that had been bought, like so many in Kensington, by a trust controlled from the British Virgin Islands.
Powell told me that, while Siddiq was cleared of breaking the ministerial code, she “made the right decision to resign”. In the run-up to the election, Labour – and particularly the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy – spoke about the need for significant action on dirty money and the power it can command. As America’s oligarchs line up behind Donald Trump, our government’s commitment to transparency and anti-corruption could not be more important.
[See also: Emily Thornberry: “I want to rebuild good vibes about the UK”]
This article appears in the 22 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Messiah Complex