Party says Johnson and Gove may have breached ministerial code as Vote Leave is fined

Labour has called for an investigation into possible misconduct by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and others during the Brexit vote after the Electoral Commission fined the Vote Leave campaign they fronted £61,000 and reported it to the police.

The watchdog said it found “significant evidence” of coordination between Vote Leave and a smaller campaign group, BeLeave, during the 2016 referendum. It said it imposed fines because the group had refused to cooperate fully.



During a debate in the Commons following an urgent question on the report, the senior Conservative backbencher, Sarah Wollaston, said the findings were so serious a second Brexit referendum should be held.

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“Consequences must follow,” she said. “We cannot have confidence that this referendum was secure, and it should be re-run.”

The Electoral Commission said it had evidence that BeLeave spent more than £675,000 with the digital data company Aggregate IQ, coordinated with Vote Leave, which should have been declared.

This meant that Vote Leave, the official designated campaign for Britain to leave the EU during the referendum, exceeded its legal spending limit of £7m by almost £500,000, the watchdog said.

The report also said the group had declined to be interviewed. Vote Leave’s former chief executive, Matthew Elliott, had previously alleged it was the Electoral Commission which had refused to cooperate. Vote Leave called the findings “wholly inaccurate”.

Darren Grimes, the founder of BeLeave, and the Vote Leave official David Halsall have been reported to the police. Vote Leave has been fined £61,000 and Grimes £20,000.

Labour said the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, should investigate whether ministers and former ministers, including Johnson and Gove, as well as others involved in Vote Leave, such as Priti Patel and Chris Grayling, had broken the ministerial code, which covers areas such as honesty and transparency.

Speaking in the Commons, Christian Matheson, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, said the report showed the Vote Leave campaign was “based on cheating and law-breaking”.

He said: “If the leaders of the Vote Leave campaign cannot be trusted to abide by the rules of the referendum, how can we trust them to abide by the rules of any future election, or indeed how can we trust them to conduct their ministerial duties with honour, integrity and honesty?”



The Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who secured the debate, said Vote Leave’s actions were “an affront to our democracy and that fundamental British value of fair play”.



Q&A Can the Electoral Commission inquiry undermine Brexit? Show Hide Campaigners on either side of the EU debate will have differing opinions on whether any adverse finding on spending calls the result of the referendum into question. However, Jo Maugham, the barrister behind the Good Law Project, said any illegal spending would undermine the result, adding to concerns about Russian meddling and Brexiters failing to deliver promises they made during the campaign. The commission can impose a fine of up to £20,000 for individual rule breaches. Any evidence of more serious offences uncovered in the course of the investigation can be referred to the police if warranted.

He said: “Given there was a 4% gap between leave and remain, and Vote Leave overspent by just under 8%, does the minister agree with me that we cannot say with confidence that this foul play did not impact on the result?”

The Cabinet Office minister Chloe Smith said she could not comment on current police investigations or on the potential actions of people not named in the report.

The Electoral Commission is independent and had been effective, Smith said. To jeers from some MPs, she added: “The point is this: we need to be able to say to the public that are watching this debate that we are getting on with delivering the result of the referendum in which they voted.”

As well as Wollaston, other senior Tories expressed disquiet at the findings. Nicholas Soames said the damage to the integrity of the electoral system was such that “the whole damn thing needs to be blown up and started all over again”.

Amber Rudd, the former home secretary, said the government must not “obfuscate from real questions that are being raised”.

Vote Leave fined and reported to police by Electoral Commission Read more

The Labour MP Stephen Kinnock said he was writing to the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, to seek a formal parliamentary commission on campaign regulation in the wake of the investigation.

Kinnock told an Electoral Reform Society event at Westminster that the fines available to the Electoral Commission were “laughable” and are seen as “a cost of doing business” by campaigns which breach them.

“The Electoral Commission’s announcements should be seen as a fork in the road – a realisation that there is something wrong in the heart of democratic processes in our system,” he said.

The commission said it had shared its investigation files with the Metropolitan police to investigate whether any offences had been committed outside its remit. It said Vote Leave did not respond to repeated requests to set interview dates, had ignored requests to provide documents before providing incorrect or incomplete documents, and had threatened to seek a judicial review of the investigation.

“Over a three-month period we actually made five attempts to interview Vote Leave and we were unable to,” the commission’s chief executive, Claire Bassett, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We have in fact issued a record fine for failure to cooperate with a statutory notice because we found it so difficult to get Vote Leave to work with us in this investigation.”

Bob Posner, also of the Electoral Commission, said Vote Leave had “resisted our investigation from the start, including contesting our right as the statutory regulator to open the investigation”.

Elliott said the investigation was “riddled with errors” and insisted the group had accepted invitations for interviews.

A Vote Leave spokesman said the report “contains a number of false accusations and incorrect assertions that are wholly inaccurate and do not stand up to scrutiny”, accusing the commission of being “motivated by a political agenda rather than uncovering the facts”.