David Cameron's former director of strategy, Steve Hilton, has claimed that Microsoft threatened Conservative MPs with closure of its facilities in their constituencies if planned changes to government IT policy were implemented. The Guardian reports Hilton as saying: "When we proposed this [change], Microsoft phoned Conservative MPs with Microsoft R&D facilities in their constituencies and said, 'we will close them down in your constituency if this goes through.'"

This is not the first time such accusations have been made. Last year, Computer Weekly reported that Rohan Silva, a senior advisor to David Cameron on digital policy, had told a similar story of Microsoft threatening in 2007 to cut jobs if a new Conservative policy of moving to open standards and open source were announced. "A day or two before we were going to give the speech," Silva is quoted as saying, "a couple of backbench MPs called the office—they said Microsoft had called them saying if we went ahead with the speech on open standards, open architecture and open source, they would cut spending or maybe close research and development centres in the constituencies of the MPs they had called.”

According to Silva, it was George Osborne that helped respond: "I went to see George [Osborne] and he said if Microsoft have a problem with the speech they should call us directly. I relayed that back to the MPs and we never got a call from Microsoft, so we went ahead with the speech." The UK government's move to open standards was finally announced in July 2014, after years of fierce resistance from Microsoft, as revealed by Freedom of Information requests.

Microsoft declined to comment on either of the allegations, telling The Guardian that it had "nothing to share." Hilton claims that Microsoft is not the only company resorting to these kinds of threats: "we had the same from other tech companies as well … We had the stories from the MPs saying I’ve just had this call from—sometimes a global CEO—phoning a Conservative MP, saying we will close down this plant."