The Electoral Commission has re-opened an investigation into Vote Leave's EU referendum spending.
The campaign paid £625,000 to clear bills allegedly run up by university student Darren Grimes with a digital agency days ahead of last June's vote.This payment was mentioned in the September 2016 issue of Liberator, which also mentioned his time in the Liberal Democrats:
Turmoil continues in the Young Liberals (who still haven’t finished their rebrand from ‘Liberal Youth’) with yet more resignations from an executive that has now lost well over half of its members in the space of a year.
One former YL/LY member is self-described ‘classical liberal’ Darren Grimes, who joined the Conservatives last year.
Though his departure prompted much handwringing from his fellow classical liberals about alleged intolerance towards their views having driven Grimes away, it would appear he has accomplished a remarkable feat of fund raising.
Press reports in August said his one-man ‘BeLeave’ campaign against remaining in the EU received a donation of £625,000 from the official Vote Leave campaign just days before the referendum.You can download this issue from the Liberator website, where you can also subscribe to this excellent magazine.
A bit more googling that, during the party's 2015 leadership election, Darren wrote an article for Lib Dem Voice calling for Norman Lamb to be the party's leader.
It turns out to have been assembled from self-regard and prefabricated phrases:
My liberty loving generation cannot comfortably sit within statist parties like Labour or the Conservatives, which is why the Liberal Democrats need to prove themselves to be the party offering this generation a truly liberal voice in British politics.
We need to be more radical in our thinking, we need intellectual evidence-based liberal policy that grabs the attention of the electorate and exasperates right-wing media like the Daily Mail and Breitbart.
Not quite sure why you feel the need to mention the LDV article. How were we supposed to know in the Summer of 2015 that Grimes would turn out to be at the centre of a brexit supporting funding controversy?
ReplyDeleteYou know most of the Lib Dem Voice team supported Tim Farron to be leader in that election. The site remained neutral and published articles from supporters of both candidates and both candidates themselves.
I mentioned the article because I think it is interesting that Darren Grimes used to be a vocal member of the Liberal Democrats.
ReplyDeleteYou seem to take my mentioning his article as a condemnation of Lib Dem Voice. It is nothing of the sort.