This morning The Guardian and Observer (HERE), (HERE) and (HERE) are leading with several stories on how the two leave campaigns, Vote Leave (the official, government funded one) might have broken election law by working together with another campaign in a coordinated way and therefore exceeded official spending limits. Banks has said previously that Leave.eu (Farage, Banks and co) had used Cambridge Analytica - although he and they both denied it later. Meanwhile, Vote Leave used Aggregate IQ in Canada. Now a whistle blower has emerged claiming that Cambridge Analytica and Aggregate IQ were, for all intent and purposes, the same company.
Cambridge Analytica's offices were raided on Friday, as we know, by the Information Commissioner's Office.
Dominic Cummings, Vote Leave's campaign director has serious questions to answer (more than a few) since he told The Guardian he found Aggregate IQ on the internet when (a) they had no website at the time and (b) someone in the Leave campaign has now said Cambridge Analytica told him about it and AIQ was in reality the Canadian office of CA. So, The Guardian suggest, this is how the two campaigns were coordinated.
Aggregate IQ received £2.7 million from Vote Leave for digital marketing and Dominic Cummings has said they couldn't have done it (won the referendum) without AIQ's help.
More questions are also being raised about how £625,000 was donated by Vote Leave to BeLeave, a supposedly independent leave campaign run by 18 and 20 year old kids working from Vote Leave's offices and using Vote Leave's computers. Had the money been spent by Vote Leave they would have exceeded the £7 million spending limit.
And by a strange coincidence, BeLeave decided to spend the money with AIQ. Imagine that. Out of all the digital advertising companies available they chose a small, obscure company in Canada which happened to be the same one used by Vote Leave. And also, it's now claimed, the money went direct from Vote Leave's bank account to AIQ without ever touching the account of BeLeave. But don't think it was coordinated, because it wasn't. Which cynic would ever think it was?
So, not only did they lie to us, it appears they may have broken electoral spending laws as they were doing so. All it would take now for the whole misbegotten mess that is Brexit to come crashing down, is for it to emerge that Aggregate IQ used data illegally harvested from Facebook via Cambridge Analytica to direct the Vote Leave campaign. Wouldn't that be a story? I am not suggesting for a minute this happened - but it's worth asking isn't it?
When an executive from CA was caught on camera the other week by Channel 4 News, telling an undercover reporter that elections are won on emotions not facts he was using the same phrase and talking about exactly the same techniques as used by both the Vote Leave and Leave.eu campaigns. This is why they rubbished experts, always suggesting that awkward "facts" don't matter. The leave campaigns played on people's hopes and fears.
Of course, now those awkward "facts" like the Irish border and the loss of trade and jobs caused by Brexit keep annoyingly coming up and they have no answers.
But emotions can only take you so far. Sooner or later emotion comes up against facts, and facts always win in the end.
The BBC are starting to cover the story HERE and HERE and The Independent HERE. The Telegraph has covered it by saying BoJo denies the claims HERE - in which case they're almost certainly true.
The BBC are starting to cover the story HERE and HERE and The Independent HERE. The Telegraph has covered it by saying BoJo denies the claims HERE - in which case they're almost certainly true.
