Eyebrows were raised this afternoon when an email from Rishi landed in people’s inboxes promoting his leadership campaign. Subscribers to the newsletter, today’s was the 48th edition, no doubt signed up to the mailing list when Rishi was Chancellor and used it to promote his Treasury work from the past week. Some have therefore questioned whether Sunak committed some sort of major GDPR breach by using his newsletter as a means of promoting his campaign. Unfortunately for rival campaigns, Guido reckons the answer it is all within the rules…
The newsletter, despite being called “No. 11”, was always written for Rishi as a person, not the office, and by his SpAds rather than civil servants. Rishi could choose to write about what he ate for dinner last night – it would still be fully compliant with the rules.
Guido also understands no taxpayer funded SpAd time was spent writing this edition, and nobody’s emails have been transferred elsewhere for use by the wider campaign effort, it merely gives subscribers a new link to sign up for campaign updates. All legal and clever, if rather sneaky…
