Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

By Peter Geoghegan

The Sunday Times bestseller.
'A compulsively readable, carefully researched account of how a malignant combination of rightwing ideology, secretive money (much of it from the US) and weaponisation of social media have shaped contemporary British (and to a limited extent, European) politics... Remarkable' Observer, Book of the Week

Democracy is in crisis, and unaccountable and untraceable flows of money are helping to destroy it.

This is the story of how money, vested interests and digital skulduggery are eroding trust in democracy. Antiquated electoral laws are broken with impunity, secretive lobbying is bending our politics out of shape and Silicon Valley tech giants collude in selling out democracy. Politicians lie gleefully, making wild claims that can be shared instantly with millions on social media.

Peter Geoghegan is a diligent, brilliant guide through the shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond.
Praise for Democracy for Sale:
'Thorough, gripping and vitally important' Oliver Bullough

'A brilliant description of the dark underbelly of modern democracy. Everyone should read it' Anne Applebaum

'A compelling and very readable story of the ongoing corruption of our government and therefore ourselves' Anthony Barnett

'As urgent as it is illuminating' Fintan O'Toole

'This urgent, vital book is essential reading for anyone who wants to make sense of our politics' Carole Cadwalladr

'This forensic and highly readable book shows how so many of our democratic processes have moved into the murky, unregulated spaces of globalisation and digital innovation' Peter Pomerantsev

'A call to arms for all those who value democracy' The Herald

'Geoghegan's words are those of someone who is prepared to keep fighting to defend and revitalise what shadows of democracy still remain'Scotsman

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: May 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789546026

Peter Geoghegan

Peter Geoghegan is an Irish writer, broadcaster and investigations editor at the award-winning news website openDemocracy. He led openDemocracy's investigations into dark money in British politics that were nominated for a 2019 British Journalism award and the Paul Foot award. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books and many other publications. His last book, The People's Referendum: Why Scotland Will Never Be the Same Again, was nominated for the Saltire First Book Award.

Book preview

1

INTRODUCTION

A book about the dark money that is warping our politics could begin in many places. Our starting point might be a tour of Westminster, stopping to peer through the windows of the Georgian townhouses where well-heeled political consultants and think tanks plot out election-winning strategies. We could stroll around the backstreets of the City of London, searching for insights into the murky world of offshore finance amid the brash, overflowing bars and restaurants. Or head straight to the global capital of undisclosed political influence, the sleek glass and steel sepulchres of Washington DC’s corporate lobbying firms.

The genesis of this book took place somewhere less obvious: Seaburn metro station on the outskirts of Sunderland, on 21 June 2016. Two days before the UK voted to leave the European Union, my editor had sent me to report on what voters thought in Sunderland. It was a warm summer’s morning and there were only a handful of people on the open-air platform. I approached a middle-aged man with a soft face who was also waiting for the train to Newcastle.

How will you vote? I asked, falling into the only mode of conversation for a reporter in an unfamiliar place before a polling day. He wanted Brexit. He talked about pit closures and disinvestment, deindustrialisation and neglect. It was not hard to see why he felt politically abandoned. He had a particular worry about the EU: that Turkey would soon join. He talked about how millions of Turkish workers could soon be coming to the UK in search of jobs. I asked where he had heard about this. Facebook, he said.

A minute or two later the train arrived. I thanked my interlocutor for his time and sat down alone in an almost empty carriage. A well-thumbed copy of the free Metro lay on the adjacent seat. The front page was a wraparound advertisement calling on Britons to take back control, the slogan of the official Vote Leave campaign. I turned the paper over. An imprint on the back said that the advert had been paid for by the Democratic Unionist Party.

This was very curious. Since its foundation in 1971, the DUP had never run a single candidate outside Northern Ireland. Now it was splashing out on a massive ad campaign promoting Brexit in England. I knew that election spending in the UK is tightly capped. I also knew, having worked as a reporter in Belfast, that political donations to Northern Irish parties were kept secret under anachronistic local laws. Perhaps this was a way around campaign limits? I posted a photograph of the advert on Twitter, wondering aloud what was going on. Only a handful of people responded to my tweet.

Slowly, the suburban train cut through verdant countryside, past relics of former industrial glory. Sunderland was once, it is said, the largest shipbuilding town in the world. I forgot about the advert, opened my laptop and began drafting my report for the next day’s paper.

Sunderland was one of the first places to declare on referendum night. Over 60 per cent voted to leave the European Union. It was a result that set the tone for a stunning political upset. Through the night, pollsters struggled to explain a vote that defied their predictive models. The next morning, markets nose-dived. The resignation of the prime minister, David Cameron, was only the third item on many news bulletins. The ensuing years of chaos laid bare the fault lines of modern Britain and have changed Europe forever.

In the months that followed the Brexit vote, my mind kept returning to Seaburn station. How could the Democratic Unionists, a tiny party in the context of British politics, afford to buy hugely expensive ads in northern English newspapers? Why were voters in Sunderland seeing stories on Facebook about Turkey joining the EU? Who was paying for all this? My colleagues and I would spend much of the next three years asking such questions.

We found answers, but rarely those we had expected. The DUP’s advertising blitz was bankrolled by the biggest donation in Northern Irish history, routed through a secretive Scottish group linked to a former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence. The Vote Leave campaign – led by its ruthless chief strategist Dominic Cummings – broke electoral laws on overspending when it bought highly targeted Facebook adverts with a Canadian digital company that almost nobody had heard of. Arron Banks, an insurance broker with interests in gold mines and a sprawling business empire registered in tax havens around the world, had become the biggest campaign donor in British electoral history. Banks was eventually investigated – and exonerated – by the National Crime Agency, amid concerns about the sources of his record Brexit contributions.

The trail continued, stretching far beyond Britain’s shores – from Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon and leading figures in Donald Trump’s America to Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and Europe’s insurgent far right. There were corporate-funded think tanks and lobbyists with access to the highest levels of government and networks of keyboard warriors in suburban bedrooms churning out hyper-partisan news stories that spread like digital wildfire. The more we uncovered, the more we became aware of serious concerns about central aspects of how democracy is supposed to function. Some of what we saw was illegal. Even more alarmingly, much of it was not.

*

Dark money is an American neologism for an increasingly global phenomenon: funds from unknown sources that influence our politics. This money gets into the political system in an increasing variety of ways, from loopholes in election law and online campaign fundraising through to anonymously funded, agenda-setting pressure groups. In her authoritative book on election finance, Dark Money, American journalist Jane Mayer outlines how US democracy was effectively bought by a cadre of the super-rich and their surrogates, often through faceless political action committees – so-called super Pacs – that can spend limitless amounts of money.

The sums involved in American political funding are enormous. The Koch brothers, David and Charles, co-owners of the second-largest private company in the United States with strong interests in coal and petroleum, spent more than $1.5 billion on Republican political causes until David’s death in 2019. The pair bankrolled countless conservative think tanks and politicians. Trump’s biggest backers included hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, whose data firm Cambridge Analytica also worked on Trump’s presidential campaign. In America, elections involving hundreds of millions of voters have become contests decided, in key constituencies, by a handful of plutocrats.

In Britain, money has long played a determining role in politics. The ‘rotten boroughs’ of the 18th and 19th centuries were notoriously crooked, and their tiny electorates could be bought by influential patrons. The Reform Act of 1832 did not end corruption. Bribery was so endemic in an 1880 by-election in Sandwich that the constituency was subsequently abolished. David Lloyd George shamelessly sold peerages to wartime spivs and profiteers to fund his prime ministerial lifestyle.

You have to go back to the 1920s to find the last time a general election candidate was convicted of breaking spending limits, but only the most optimistic would believe that the financial restraints in British politics are not frequently exceeded. Money corrodes the political system in other ways, too. In the 1960s, architect and planner John Poulson and building firm Bovis bribed Labour politicians across the north-east to approve major construction projects. Three decades later, lobbyist Ian Greer gave Tory MPs cash in brown envelopes in return for asking parliamentary questions useful to his clients. More recently, former Labour ministers have compared themselves to cabs for hire, their wheels greased by generous daily retainers. When the MP expenses scandal broke in 2009, it revealed that parliamentarians had been claiming for everything from cleaning a moat on their country estate to mortgages on expensive second homes. Public trust in politics has never really recovered since.

British politics is comparatively low-spending, especially when set against the United States, but there is plenty of evidence that the American model of hidden finance and clandestine influence has traversed the pond. Britain, as the London-based American political analyst Anne Applebaum notes, has become a place where untransparent money, from unknown sources, is widely accepted with a complacent shrug.¹ The relatively small sums involved can make it even easier to get access to the top table of British politics. US donors might be expected to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in a single election cycle. But for fifty grand pretty much anyone can get a seat with the British prime minister at a lavish Conservative Leader’s Group dinner where discussions are kept strictly private, even if they touch on government policy.

The dark money playbook is straightforward. Take advantage of shady campaign financing; circumvent electoral rules where you can; and draw on a network of supportive think tanks, a receptive media run by a handful of magnates and hard-line caucuses within the long-established political parties. As we shall see, the same strategies and tactics are increasingly employed in the UK and across much of the world. From Vote Leave playing fast and loose with electoral law to the international influence campaign underpinning the rise of the populist right in Europe, politicians and their surrogates are increasingly willing to push the boundaries as far as they will go, and beyond. Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016 after a campaign marred by disinformation and electoral interference. Far from being an aberration, dirty politics is the new normal.

What’s so bad about political campaigns not declaring the source of their funds? Does dark money actually matter?

It does, profoundly. Even relatively meagre sums can shift the political needle and generate highly effective lobbying operations. Small purposeful groups are adept at taking control of policy in ways that are very hard to see for those not regularly involved in politics. In Britain, a nexus of corporate-funded libertarian think tanks and transatlantic media moguls turned a ‘no-deal’ Brexit from what was in 2016 an outlandish proposal into a more or less explicit government policy option after Boris Johnson became prime minister in the summer of 2019.

These think tanks maintain that corporate donors do not dictate their views. Whether BP or big tobacco is giving them money, they insist, does not change their core commitment to economic freedom and small government. That is of course a reasonable position to take, but it ignores the pernicious way in which undeclared corporate donations buy privileged access to the political system. The amount of space and time in public debate is finite. Slots on crepuscular current affairs television programmes are limited (even if it doesn’t always feel that way). Dark money gives these small, unrepresentative groups a marked advantage, pays for slick and articulate reports and polished media appearances, and accentuates the risk of the public sphere being captured by vested interests.

Dark money has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of digital disinformation. It is a truism that politics has been transformed in recent years. But it is not just the outcomes, the election of disruptive authoritarian populists, that have changed. Behind Brexit, Trump and a host of other unforeseen ruptures is a paradigm shift in the nature of political communication. The digital world offers voters the opportunity to live in echo chambers where their political prejudices are confirmed and reinforced daily. We can all choose a tribe now and decide not to hear any voices critical of our choice. As politics is increasingly mediated through Silicon Valley tech giants, falsehoods and mistruths spread at light speed. So far, few political leaders have been willing to back down in a digital arms race in which every potential advantage is seized upon.

The communications revolution has changed our politics in ways we are still struggling to understand. Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party may have ceded most of its power to Boris Johnson in the December 2019 general election, but the remarkable story of its short-lived success tells us a lot. In May of the same year, Britain’s first ‘digital party’ topped the polls in European Parliament elections in the UK, less than four months after it was first registered. Inspired by Italy’s Five Star Movement, the Brexit Party ran a sophisticated online campaign that tapped into widespread anger that Britain was still in the EU, nearly three years after the country had voted to leave.

This pop-up party was governed by a constitution that gave Farage almost complete control. Rather than members with internal voting rights, its supporters gave money but had no power. Ahead of the European elections, tens of thousands of people donated online through PayPal, with minimal checks. The electoral regulator warned that the Brexit Party’s online fundraising could allow donors to evade the rules banning foreign contributions to British politics. But by then the votes had already been counted.

If the problem was just one of laws being broken, there would be a simple solution: tougher enforcement. Increase fines until the pips squeak. Introduce the threat of jail time. Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen was given a three-year prison sentence in 2018 for violating campaign finance laws during the presidential campaign. If British political operatives faced similar risks, then bad behaviours might swiftly change.

But the corruption of democracy is as much about perfectly legal abuse as it is law-breaking malfeasance. American religious funders have quietly pumped tens of millions of dollars into conservative campaigns across Europe, fuelling a reactionary backlash against women’s and minority rights.

Already there are signs that faith in democracy has been badly shaken. Authoritarian attitudes are on the rise. From the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government in India, voters around the world are increasingly turning to ‘strongman’ leaders. In developed nations, dissatisfaction with democracy is running at record levels. A study by Cambridge University’s Centre for the Future of Democracy published in 2020 found that some 58 per cent of people were unhappy with democracy.² Discontent was particularly pronounced in two places: Britain and the United States.

The crisis in British democracy has become an increasingly partisan issue. Many prominent figures have been keen to silence any conversation about the flaws in our democratic system. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has kicked proposals for electoral reform into the long grass. All the while, democratic norms have been eroded. Judges were branded enemies of the people. The government shut down Parliament and attacked the apolitical civil service. As Johnson has shown, repeatedly lying is no barrier to the highest public office.

Against this backdrop of growing anti-democratic sentiment among both the public and politicians, political scientist Martin Moore warns that our democracy is no longer working as it should. There is a genuine crisis of representation, he says. How does democracy actually work in this new era? Right now it’s not at all clear that we know.

*

Writing about politics in such a tumultuous period comes with obvious challenges. Prime ministers – and policies – have come and gone so readily. But behind the political theatrics, the underlying problems remain. Rules and regulations intended to manage a developed, properly functioning democracy have often been sorely lacking in a far more politically restive age. Ineffective checks and balances have been a boon for lobbyists and political opportunists. The absence of a truly representative electoral system or a codified constitution has only added to Britain’s democratic malaise. Regardless of what the country’s post-Brexit future looks like, its broken system needs radical surgery.

But before we open the patient up, we need to understand the disease’s aetiology.

I have structured this book both chronologically and thematically. The opening chapters are directly concerned with the 2016 Brexit referendum and examine in some detail examples of electoral sharp practice that took place, from Vote Leave’s law-breaking to Arron Banks’s record spending to the DUP’s dark money. These different stories are both crucial to understanding the context of modern British politics and illustrative of far deeper problems in our democracy. We will see how, time and time again, regulators have been found wanting, and almost nothing has been done to prevent future abuses.

The middle section of the book lays out how dark money has facilitated the growing American influence on British politics. We will explore the rise of the ‘Anglosphere’ – the idea that Britain’s future lies with other English-speaking nations – and see how taxpayer and private money helped the European Research Group of pro-Brexit MPs become kingmakers at a crucial moment in British political history. We will also examine the influence of corporate-funded think tanks on Westminster, focusing in particular on the role of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Born down an alleyway in the City of London in 1955, the IEA became the inspiration for many of the most influential obscurely funded think tanks operating in Washington DC today and has tried, with varying success, to be a major player in what its director unwittingly called the Brexit influencing game.

The final third of the book examines how technology has transformed politics and created endless new opportunities for dark money to corrode it. From Cambridge Analytica to the British Conservative Party ‘shit-posting’ on social media during the 2019 general election, we will see how online political advertising has been revolutionised and meet the digital campaigners that brought state-of-the-art political messaging from the US to Britain. Once again, we will find laws that are hopelessly out of date in the digital age.

We will delve into the world of online disinformation, meeting some of the people behind the online news sites that push populist messages across the Internet. We will chart the rise of Europe’s populist right and trace the increasing international flows of unaccountable money, specifically from American Christian right-wing groups that have been funding campaigns from Eastern Europe to Latin America to back home in the US in the context of the 2020 presidential election.

Before our dark money tour gets started, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the role of some of the many colleagues whose work I draw on in this book. This book would not have been possible without the team at openDemocracy, where I work. Without the dedication of a tenacious, far-sighted editor-in-chief in Mary Fitzgerald and a small band of talented colleagues, particularly Adam Ramsay, Jenna Corderoy, Jim Cusick and Claire Provost, many of the stories in this book would not have come to light.

Elsewhere, Carole Cadwalladr, writing for the Observer and the Guardian, has been a tireless campaigning journalist on everything from Arron Banks to Cambridge Analytica. BBC Northern Ireland’s Spotlight team revealed crucial new material about the DUP’s bank-breaking donations. The investigative unit at Channel 4 News broke major new ground. Reporters at the Financial Times, Buzzfeed, Source Material and Byline also pieced together important elements of the story.

All that said, I still find it remarkable that it was so often left to a handful of journalists, often in small, non-profits such as openDemocracy, to shine a light on the role of dark money in our politics. Many much larger outlets have shied away from investing their far greater resources in these stories, even though they raise fundamental questions about the foundations of our democracy.

Throughout what follows, I often draw on reports produced by parliamentary committees, regulators and NGOs, as well as secondary sources and original research. I would like to thank the dozens and dozens of people from across the political spectrum who spoke to me for this book, both on and off the record.

I should state at the outset, too, that I do not believe that Brexit was some grand conspiracy. The force of much of the British state apparatus and its political and business establishment was behind remaining in the European Union. Pro-Leave campaigns broke the law, but we cannot say with any certainty that the result would have been different if they had not. Instead, the referendum and its aftermath have revealed something far more fundamental and systemic. Namely, a broken political system that is ripe for exploitation again. And again. And again.

I grew up during one of the most optimistic moments in post-war European history: in a small town near the Irish border as the Troubles ended and the economy roared. My father was born in a cottage. I graduated from one of Britain’s most prestigious universities. I lived most of my life with an almost Panglossian view of human potential. Bad things happen, but they can be stopped. New worlds, better worlds were possible.

It is only recently that I have started to appreciate how often this is not the case. That change is not always for the good. That advances once made can be lost again. That democracy is not something that can be left only to politicians, regulators and, a few days each decade, to voters.

I’m still an optimist. I believe our democracies can be defended, and even strengthened. Reform is possible. Tech companies can be reined in; regulations can be strengthened and properly enforced; new ways of democracy can be imagined and invoked. First, though, we need to understand how and why our democracy is on leave.

January 2020

2

DEMOCRACY ON LEAVE?

However, there is another organisation that could spend your money. Would you be willing to send the 100k to some social media ninjas who could usefully spend it on behalf of this organisation? I am very confident it would be well spent in the final crucial 5 days. Obviously it would be entirely legal.¹

DOMINIC CUMMINGS, email to

Vote Leave donor, 11 June 2016

In late August 2019, Boris Johnson wrote a memo to the Westminster cabinet committee tasked with preparing for a no-deal Brexit. The freshly minted prime minister had pledged to leave the European Union do or die. Now he told ministers to act immediately to share all user data from their departmental websites. The government wanted to create a platform for gathering targeted and personalised information. Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s chief advisor, emailed senior officials telling them that the data collection was a TOP PRIORITY.²

A few years earlier, a government plan to transfer masses of data would likely have gone largely unnoticed. A privacy campaigner might have offered a comment; a lowly opposition politician would have raised a question without expecting much of an answer. But the story of Johnson’s diktat hit the headlines. Labour deputy leader Tom Watson described the proposal as very suspicious. Others complained that the government was secretly planning to hoover up detailed data about its citizens.

There were reasons for this heightened sensitivity. We are all (slightly) more wary of how our personal information is used, especially by political campaigners. Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018, following a scandal about the massive misuse of Facebook data from tens of millions of users. But there was another reason the story of the prime minister’s memo made waves. It had ‘Dominic Cummings’ and ‘data’ in the same headline.

Cummings has been the closest contemporary British politics has to a Machiavelli. Like the author of The Prince, he has a piercing stare and a prematurely receding hairline. The mastermind behind the unexpected vote for Brexit in 2016, Cummings presented himself as a British political strategist with an uncanny knack for tapping into voters’ deepest desires. He read military historians, was inspired by Silicon Valley technocrats and wrote voluminous blog posts on everything from the Apollo space programme to Otto von Bismarck. Where others obsessed about appealing to the news media, Cummings – despite his well-heeled Oxbridge background – talked about opposing established elites. When then prime minister David Cameron described him as a career psychopath, it only served to feed the Cummings mythology.

A former colleague said of Cummings: He doesn’t really believe in government at all.³ If he had faith in anything, it was data. During the EU referendum, Cummings ran what he proudly called the first campaign in the UK to put almost all our money into digital communication.⁴ Vote Leave bought an estimated 1.5 billion Facebook advertisements directed at seven million people. Many of these targeted ads spread misinformation, particularly about immigration and the financial benefits of leaving the European Union. The campaign was also helped by massive illegal overspending, which paid for millions of digital ads. Cummings credited this almost invisible social media blitz, mostly delivered in the final days before the vote, with securing victory in a tight referendum.

Cummings’s installation in Downing Street in July 2019 was followed by a sudden spike in digital activity by the new administration. Almost immediately, hundreds of targeted adverts promoting the new prime minister started appearing online. One Facebook ad paid for by the Conservatives trumpeted a BBC news story reporting a £14 billion pound cash boost for schools. But it was not true. The BBC headline had been doctored. The actual figure quoted in the BBC story was just £7.1 billion. The ad was eventually taken down amid a chorus of criticism but it had run for two weeks before anyone flagged it.

This dissembling was a taste of things to come. A few months later, the Conservatives ran the most dishonest general election campaign in British political history. Independent fact-checkers accused the Tories of misleading the public, after the party’s official Twitter account was rebranded as a fact-checking website during a television debate. Dark money-funded pro-Johnson ads flooded social media. Conservative Party sources routinely lied to journalists. Many saw the spirit of Dominic Cummings behind the onslaught of disinformation.

Having vowed to deliver Brexit in government, Cummings was credited with instigating Boris Johnson’s controversial decision to suspend Parliament in August 2019 in an unsuccessful attempt to force through an accelerated departure from the EU. (The Supreme Court later ruled the prorogation unlawful.) Twenty-one Tory MPs who voted to block a no-deal Brexit had the whip removed. Dominic Cummings has been hired by Boris to lay waste, complained Winston Churchill’s grandson, Nicholas Soames. He is doing the job he was asked to do.⁵

Cummings was not the only Vote Leave alumnus that Johnson brought into the heart of his administration. Press officer Lee Cain became the prime minister’s head of communications. The Leave campaign’s youthful social media maven Chloe Westley took up a similar role at Number 10. So many former campaign staff were given jobs in the new administration that Guardian columnist Jonathan Freeland declared it a Vote Leave government. It didn’t seem to matter much that the campaign had in fact broken the law in 2016. Pumping hundreds of thousands of pounds more than the legal limit into millions of Facebook adverts targeted at undecided voters was treated as an historical footnote, if it was mentioned at all.

But precisely how Vote Leave broke the law and pushed the boundaries of digital campaigning matters a great deal. Not because it shows that the Brexit vote was fraudulent, but because it’s one of the clearest examples of why our electoral system is broken. It demonstrates how even relatively small sums of money can influence our politics – and how our system is still wide open to abuse, especially through digital means.

Vote Leave’s story is a parable about how modern campaigns, of all kinds, can bend and break laws drafted for a very different era, and how regulators have failed to get to grips with the rapidly changing realities of democratic consultation. To understand all this, we first need to understand how leaving the European Union went from a dream shared by a small band of largely libertarian Eurosceptics to a campaign that changed the face of Britain.

*

The 2016 vote to leave the European Union was a culmination that many Brexiters had spent their lives working towards. A political project long dismissed as the preserve of what then Conservative prime minister David Cameron called fruitcakes and loonies had won the day. More than anything else, the result was a vindication of the much derided official ‘out’ campaign, Vote Leave, and particularly its bosses Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings. Few had given them a chance.

Vote Leave was both the product of decades of Eurosceptic agitation and rhetoric and, not unusually in British politics, a conversation between a small group of confidants. On a warm summer’s day in 2012, Matthew Elliott met Daniel Hannan in a summer house belonging to a septuagenarian Eurosceptic merchant banker named Rodney Leach.⁶ For two decades, Hannan had been the nearest thing to an intellectual motor behind Conservative opposition to the EU. In that time he had progressed from the debating halls of Oxford to the chambers of the European Parliament, but his core beliefs about ‘restoring’ national sovereignty had remained unaltered. Daniel wanted to destroy Brussels, one former colleague told me.

Now the push for a referendum on Europe was gathering pace. Cameron would soon commit to holding a vote. But the nascent campaign for withdrawal needed a front man. Hannan wanted Elliott to take on the role. I knew it had to be Matt, he would later tell Sunday Times journalist Tim Shipman.⁷

In many ways, Elliott was an obvious choice to lead what became Vote Leave. He was young, had Westminster experience and was steeped in Euroscepticism. He was also a devoted free marketer. Growing up in a solidly middle-class family headed by a trade unionist father in 1980s northern England, Elliott picked up his politics outside the home.

"I remember at Leeds Grammar School there was an economics teacher called Terry Ellsworth, and he basically taught us A-Level economics using Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose books and video series. I think a lot of my free market economics came from that," Elliott later recalled.⁸ He went on to the London School of Economics, where he became president of the Hayek Society, named after the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist and polemicist against government intervention.

From the beginning of his career, Elliott worked to apply North American libertarian methods to British politics. Shortly after graduating from university, he paid his first visit to Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative Washington DC taxpayer advocacy group set up by Grover Norquist in the 1980s at the behest of president Ronald Reagan. Its corporate funders have included the Koch brothers’ various foundations.

Elliott brought Norquist’s model to Britain.⁹ In 2004, aged just 25, he co-founded the TaxPayers’ Alliance to campaign in favour of tax cuts and privatisation. The TPA called for the television licence fee – which pays for the BBC – to be abolished and the National Health Service to be replaced by private provision.

Like its American counterparts, Elliott’s pressure group was adept at capturing media attention. There was almost nothing on which it would not offer a comment. In 2008 alone, the Daily Mail quoted the TaxPayers’ Alliance in a staggering 517 articles. The Sun did so 307 times.¹⁰ When the TPA published a denunciation of green taxes, a topless blonde model named Keeley on the Sun’s now-defunct Page 3 asked readers: Why should Britain pay over the odds when our energy usage is lower than other countries?¹¹ Even the revelation that one of the TPA’s founders, Anthony Heath, did not actually pay any tax in the UK did little to dent the group’s media reach.¹²

Elliott grew the TPA into a £1 million-a-year operation employing over a dozen staff. The impressive growth was undergirded by dark money. Although the TPA campaigned for greater transparency in government, Elliott always refused to say who funded it. I think people have a right to donate to charities and campaigns anonymously, he said when pressed.¹³

Money did come from leading Conservative donors, including JCB tycoon Anthony Bamford, former Tory co-treasurer Peter Cruddas and the secretive Midlands Industrial Council, initially set up in 1946 to oppose Clement Attlee’s nationalisation programme. The TPA was part of a lattice of libertarian and climate-sceptic outlets that often operated in tandem, pushing similar policies and causes. Many are based at the same address, 55 Tufton Street, a four-storey Georgian townhouse on an elegant Westminster side street. The house is owned by Conservative businessman Richard Smith.¹⁴

Washington lobbyists frequently pass through Tufton Street and its environs. In September 2010, Elliott hosted a huge free market roadshow¹⁵ in central London featuring a raft of influential American libertarians: the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Krieble Foundation and many more. Pride of place was reserved for the conservative movement sweeping across the United States, the aggressively anti-government Tea Party. A Tea Party-aligned consultant said that she had wanted to identify groups in Europe that could start activist wings¹⁶. At the time, Elliott said: It will be fascinating to see whether it will transfer to the UK. Will there be the same sort of uprising?¹⁷*

It was not just Elliott’s familiarity with transatlantic libertarianism that would have appealed to the ardent Atlanticist Daniel Hannan as he set about building a campaign to leave the EU. Elliott’s CV also contained a particularly rare qualification: he already had experience winning a British referendum.

In 2011, Britain held its first national referendum since the vote on joining the European project more than thirty-five years earlier. This time around, the proposal was more narrowly procedural. Should Westminster switch from the first-past-the-post electoral system to the slightly more proportional alternative vote?

The proposed alteration was a fudge. The Liberal Democrats, who wanted full proportional representation, had agreed to a referendum on a less democratic electoral measure as part of their coalition agreement with David Cameron’s Conservatives.

Matthew Elliott led the campaign against the measure. In a foreshadowing of Vote Leave five years later, NO to AV quickly framed the terms of the debate with dubious figures and kept to a small number of simple messages. Elliott claimed that the alternative vote would cost £250 million to introduce. The claim was refuted by the Electoral Commission and the non-aligned Political Studies Association. It didn’t matter. Billboards ran photographs of a sick child in an incubator alongside the slogan She needs a new cardiac facility, not an alternative voting system. ‘Yes’ lost by a crushing two to one on polling day.¹⁸

NO to AV also provided a trial run for the Brexit referendum in other ways. Elliott focused heavily on digital campaigning. He pushed messages on Facebook and built online applications that encouraged voters to attend real-world campaign events. It was cutting-edge for the time.

Matthew was one of those people who saw early that we needed to put digital at the heart of the campaign. He had seen what was happening in the US, says Jag Singh, an American digital expert who worked on NO to AV and later set up a digital political consultancy with Elliott and Paul Staines from the right-wing website Guido Fawkes.

Elliott did not immediately establish Vote Leave after his meeting with Hannan. Instead, in 2013 he set up a prototype campaign called Business for Britain, again based at 55 Tufton Street. By then Cameron had pledged to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with Brussels. The aim of Business for Britain was to subtly force Cameron’s hand. I realised that business was the way into it, Elliott later said. "We did not do it as a hard Brexit campaign but went along the lines of the renegotiation, albeit pushing further what the PM would

Reviews for Democracy for Sale

[the7ken7petersen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am being most unfair by docking this title of a star. The author has worked hard to produce sound evidence of the fall of democratic trustworthiness. Let us be honest, politicians are never high on a list of trusted professionals so, you may admire their ability to slip further but, it is possible.Money talks and it is seeping into British politics with ever increasing ease. We Brits have, for many years, looked down our noses at those tasteless Americans, scoffed at President Trump and "known our superiority". Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have proved that we were in error. At the last General Election, my local MP, in humble Great Yarmouth, was given £50,000 by a couple of Russian donors who do not live, or own business interests within the area. This was perfectly legal but, one has to ask what they wanted in return. The political system would have you believe that they want nothing and that the money is given for the improvement of the country. When was the last time that you gave a significant sum of money with no expected return? (Not counting close family members!)Not only does this book look at the fiscal defrauding of politics, it also reviews on line political advertising. Bare faced lies can be distributed, with the party's logo attached. The lie may be taken down at some stage, but it will have done its duty by then. It will have been sent only to those susceptible to the message: your every move, keyboard click and almost thought are recorded by helpful Big Brother.Finally, that unfair reason for deducting a star: there is so little likelihood of anything changing. Presumably, the winning party in an election, has used the system more effectively than their opponents: why would they want to change the system?Orwell was correct; Big Brother is watching you...