[Pikachu_Dad]

Continued “The Battle Bus was a candidate expense in South Thanet In this campaign a campaigning method called “the Battle Bus”, or “Road Trip 2015”, or “Team2015” was employed. This involved busing in significant numbers of volunteers to a constituency to campaign there. Substantial costs for transport and accommodation would be incurred and these would not appear on the candidate’s expenses return either, whatever they did when they got there. On 26th April 2015 the “Battle Bus” or “Team2015” arrived for one of these visits to South Thanet, and the evidence is clear what these volunteers did when they got there. By an email dated 25th April 2015 Marion Little told Deborah Feldman, at Conservative Party Headquarters, exactly what they were going to do, namely deliver a Ramsgate Regeneration Leaflet. This instruction was given to the volunteers themselves by Mrs. Little in a document she created which said that there were three objectives for them  Deliver 6k leaflets in Ramsgate to publicise Craig’s Ramsgate Regeneration plan  Hand address envelopes to different groups of target voters in the constituency  Get posters up on main roads. If the posters were generic or national posters, that part of the work would be a national party expense, but no informed person thinking honestly about the question could possibly conclude that that the first two items were anything other than a Craig Mackinlay campaign expense. By an email on 26th April 2015 Mrs. Little reported back to Paul Abbott and Chrissie Boyle exactly what the volunteers had done:- “Thank you to Team 2015 We managed to deliver just under 7k leaflets and hand address two wards of pledge envelopes and get some posters up” This leaflet was one of the new items of campaign literature created by her team. It has a photograph of Craig Mackinlay on the front, and another on the back. It says, among other things, “Craig Mackinlay, getting things done for Ramsgate”, and “Promoted by Nathan Gray on behalf of Craig Mackinlay”. It is campaign literature and its costs including the cost of its distribution were obviously a declarable election expense by the candidate. Some astutely drafted material was distributed to constituencies which might perhaps suggest otherwise, but any fully informed person standing back and thinking properly and honestly about this would know the true position. Some leaflets were distributed by paid delivery contractors and at least part of that cost was declared. How could anyone honestly think that the costs of the accommodation and transport of people who would do the same work for nothing could somehow be a national expense? I wish to make it clear that the only other evidence which the jury heard about the Battle Bus in any other constituency in 2015 came from Anna Soubry MP. She made it quite clear that when the volunteers came to her constituency all they did was a survey required by the national party to better target its national direct mail campaign. This was rightly regarded in her case as national expenditure and properly not included in her own return. She had none of her campaign literature left to be distributed by them in support of her candidacy, so she was able to say categorically that this did not happen. Whether the associated cost of this activity is local or national expenditure depends on what they do. This should have been obvious to any informed person thinking properly and honestly about the question. The accommodation costs of a volunteer were the subject of an email exchange between Mrs Little and Lady Feldman and Paul Abbott in April 2015, when it was agreed that he should not stay in the constituency because he was going to be on the national return, and not on the candidate spend, even though he was going to be working for weeks on the Mackinlay Campaign.

[Pikachu_Dad]

Continued

“Some examples of individual acts of deceit in preparing the returns

Two invoices for the Regenerate Ramsgate leaflet, totalling £238, were simply and dishonestly left off the return by Mrs. Little. This act, on its own, was enough to commit the offences of which she was convicted in relation to the short campaign return which falsely showed expenses as having been under the limit but only by £178.23.

The treatment of the Nathan Gray’s remuneration and accommodation as agent in the short campaign was also dishonest. This was said to have amounted to £916.66. It should have been about 60% of the total sum earned by him during the short campaign which was the proportion he himself used to separate out his time for his work on behalf of the candidates in the Town and District Council elections in the long campaign.

This would have been £1,040, or an additional £123 or so for the return. His hotel accommodation was dishonestly buried and omitted from the return. This also was all in the short return and amounted to at least £550.
The sum actually used for the cost of campaign posters (called “Correx Boards”) for Mr. Mackinlay in the short return appears to have been simply invented. The jury heard about some guidance issued by the Conservative Party which suggests that generic “Vote Conservative” posters can be discounted by 25% to allow for their re-use in at least two subsequent elections. These were not generic posters, but posters for Mr. Mackinlay by name. The sum on the return was were not 25% of the cost of the boards and no-one was able to explain where it came from. That in the short campaign was £854, which is a significant under declaration when the “headroom” before the legal limit was reached was small.
In addition, therefore, to the shameless use of a more or less full time professional campaign team at no cost to the candidate which I have discussed above, there were also what might be called small time financial frauds. Documents which were inconvenient were buried and convenient numbers made up.

I have said above that the treatment of the costs of the Central Headquarters campaign team and the Battle Bus was possible because of a culture of convenient self-deception by others and a lack of proper authoritative guidance about what could, and could not, be done for a candidate without incurring a declarable expense. I should make it clear that there is no evidence that anyone other than Marion Little was aware of the dishonest calculations and concealment of invoices.

(Read the rest here)
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/marion-little-sentencing-remarks.pdf