Darren Grimes has apologised for not challenging comments historian David Starkey made on his new online free speech channel, Reasoned. Being interviewed by Grimes, Starkey said:
“Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there?”
Responding to the comments furore, Grimes has just Tweeted:
Hand on heart, I wasn’t engaged enough in this interview as I should’ve been. It goes without saying that Reasoned UK does not support or condone Dr David Starkey’s words.
I am very new to being the interviewer rather than the interviewee and I should have robustly questioned Dr Starkey about his comments.
However, whether it’s on the BBC, ITV, Sky News or on YouTube, no interviewer is responsible for the views expressed by their guests.
At Reasoned UK you’ll always find unfiltered opinions, allowing the audience to make up their own minds -that said, in future – I can promise that there will be a host who is much more willing to challenge those opinions.
Darren, this is the second time not paying attention to details has got you into trouble…
Last night I found out that @metpoliceuk, after investigation and consultation with @cpsuk, has rejected the trumped-up charges against @vote_leave and me by the kangaroo court that is @ElectoralCommUK. After four hellish years, it's finally over! Thank you for your support! x pic.twitter.com/M7wH4vgm3d
— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) May 8, 2020
Today is of course VE day, enjoy the celebrations. Darren Grimes and Alan Halsall will be celebrating more than most today, because it sees final victory for them over the biased Electoral Commission. Both Darren Grimes of BeLeave and Alan Halsall of Vote Leave have been written to by the Metropolitan Police confirming it will not be acting on allegations made against them by the Electoral Commission and various Remain campaigners. This marks the very end of a three year ordeal for both of them. Congratulations!
Here’s a timeline of the three year ordeal:
- 23 June 2016 – UK votes to leave the EU by a margin of 52% to 48%
- August 2016 – Electoral Commission investigates Vote Leave’s spending for the first time, but finds no evidence of wrongdoing
- February 2017 – Electoral Commission investigates Vote Leave’s spending for the second time, but again finds no evidence of wrongdoing
- October 2017 – The Good Law Project, led by Jolyon Maugham, begins proceedings to seek a judicial review against the Electoral Commission’s decision not to open a formal investigation into the spending of Vote Leave and Darren Grimes
- November 2017 – Electoral Commission investigates Vote Leave spending for a third time
- July 2018 – The Electoral Commission concludes its investigation and determines that Vote Leave exceeded its campaign spending limit due to joint spending under a ‘common plan’ with Darren Grimes/BeLeave. The Commission fined and referred both Alan Halsall, the responsible person for Vote Leave, and Mr Grimes to the Metropolitan Police
- July 2018 – Guido helps launch a crowdfunder to enable Darren to fight the Electoral Commission
- August 2019 – Darren Grimes successfully appeals against the Electoral Commission’s fine of £20,000
- May 2020 – the Metropolitan Police drop their investigation into Alan Halsall and Darren Grimes
Jolyon, Carole, and the biased Electoral Commission have a lot to answer for. As Vote Leave’s Paul Stephenson puts it “we wish them well“…
Darren Grimes hit the nail on the head this lunchtime, introducing new property taxes, which the Tories have campaigned against for the last three elections would be a betrayal of their voters, as well as levelling down. There are plenty of levelling up policies that don’t amount to ‘socialism lite’.
The commentariat, blinded in their Brexit rage, have failed to realise that the Vote Leave campaign crowd are not all tax cutting, small staters. The campaign to splurge billions on the NHS, as advertised on the side of the bus, should have been a clue. Many want to use power to re-engineer and make the government run better, not to shrink the state.
Cummings’ countless blog posts tell you he wants a better technocracy, his vision of a state directing billions into science is clearly not an agenda to roll back the state, the state splurging billions on concrete infrastructure projects that will never see pay back is a big state agenda. This is not the agenda of a government that wants to reduce the burden on taxpayers. We will, Guido fears, find out in the end that the trouble with zero interest rate “One Nation Toryism” is that eventually you run out of other people’s money…
After keeping everyone guessing for weeks about whether they were going to blow even more taxpayers’ money on trying to appeal against their comprehensive defeat in the Darren Grimes case, the Electoral Commission have finally decided that they will not be appealing. Today was the deadline for them to appeal, they have confirmed to Guido that they aren’t.
It finally draws a line under three years of their vindictive pursuit of one young Brexit campaigner, with the Electoral Commission resorting to trying to string Grimes up on a technicality after failing to find anything substantive over the course of multiple investigations. Without the generous support of Guido readers, Brexit hero Darren would never have been to challenge their perversion of justice in the first place. Grimes can now rest easy, meanwhile the pressure on the Electoral Commission is continuing to mount…
Labour MP Kate Hoey has called for the Electoral Commission to be disbanded after the “travesty of justice” over the way they handled the Darren Grimes case. Incredibly, the Commission are still considering an appeal against the judge’s decision despite their case being comprehensively dismantled. Blowing hundreds of thousands more of taxpayers’ cash in vindictive pursuit of one campaigner…
As Hoey says, clearly there does need to be a body that oversees elections. The highly partisan members of the current Commission and the asymmetric way they have dealt with the two sides in the referendum since means there is no confidence left in its abilities. Time to start again from the ground up…
UPDATE: Tory MP Craig Mackinlay has backed Hoey’s call to disband the Electoral Commission:
“Couldn’t agree more with @KateHoeyMP. The @ElectoralCommUK has made too many mistakes, hounded too many innocent people (I should know), given too much incorrect advice, changed its mind repeatedly, made interpretations of the law ‘on the hoof’. It has no further worth.”
The Electoral Commission had to face two Parliamentary Select Committees today after their humiliating defeat in court by Darren Grimes last Friday. Craig Mackinlay – who knows Electoral Commission incompetence only too well, took Chief Executive Bob Posner to task over their decision to relentlessly pursue Grimes while failing to fully investigate Remain campaign spending irregularities. Posner mumbles something about following those “strands” and “maybe” fining a couple of groups. They did nothing of the sort…
Instead Posner makes clear that the Electoral Commission are still considering appealing against the Darren Grimes judgement despite having already spent half a million of taxpayers’ cash on the case, although Posner points out that part of that was on the Vote Leave aspects of the case. The High Court having previously found that the Electoral Commission caused the problem in the first place by giving Vote Leave incorrect legal advice…
It’s worth looking at the specifics of the Grimes case. Guido was in the courtroom:
- The Commission’s case against Grimes himself was nothing to do with the spending limit issue around Vote Leave. So they went after him on a technicality instead…
- The Commission’s first charge was that he had not filled a form in correctly to register as an ‘unincorporated association’ rather than an individual. An issue they didn’t flag at all in their first two investigations into Grimes – which found nothing.
- They then slapped a second offence notice on him for subsequently submitting an “over-complete” spending return. Kafka-esque.
- The judge found their form itself was highly confusing and that Grimes had filled out the majority correctly, and to the extent he hadn’t it didn’t matter. The dispute centred around a single box…
- The judge also found that the Commission had essentially constructed their case the wrong way round. In effect they assumed Grimes’s guilt first and then challenged him to prove his innocence beyond reasonable doubt.
- This led them to exclude a large amount of evidence in Grimes’ favour. Precisely the opposite of how the law is meant to work.
- The judge also ruled that even if they hadn’t been wrong on the offences themselves, the maximum £20,000 fine was still disproportionate. It was vexatious.
The full judgment is yet to be published, but the outcome of the case was clear. The Electoral Commission weren’t just defeated, their whole case against Grimes was thoroughly debunked. Their QC James Eadie didn’t even bother to turn up to hear the judgment. The fact that their apparatchiks are now considering dragging it out and blowing even more taxpayers’ money just to try to save face is beyond belief…
