Guido favourite Lucy Thomas, the ‘In’ campaign’s spin chief, has emphatically declared that the BSE campaign was not set up by the EU-funded ‘European Movement’:

Britain @stronger_in Europe is in no way EU-funded & was not set up by European Movement. Care to correct? @vote_leave @odysseanproject

— Lucy Thomas (@lucycthomas) October 12, 2015

Roland Rudd, the remainers’ eminence grise, also says it is a whopper of a claim:

#StrongerIn used to distortions from LeaveEU but Toby Young @toadmeister biggest whopper yet saying we are funded by EUCommission. Not true

— Roland Rudd (@RolandRudd) October 12, 2015

Oh really?

If you look up BSE’s company registration number on Companies House, you find that it was orginally called “Interim Campaign Limited” and was registered by Laura Sandys. The chair of the European Movement.

Between 2007 and 2014 the European Movement received €4.5 million from the European Commission…

UPDATE: Toby’s Telegraph piece restored:

I've now restored that paragraph, Hugo, explaining what I meant in more detail http://t.co/jinB5qviPN https://t.co/b6pouFR6wa

— Toby Young (@toadmeister) October 12, 2015

UPDATE II: Laura Sandys gets in touch to say: “I am not involved in running the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign”. Despite incorporating their original company…

She adds: “The Interim Campaign that I established before the founding of Britain Stronger in Europe did not receive any money form the EU and was carried out completely separately to my role as chair of the European Movement”. Presumably she did it in her spare time…