3 Nov 2015

Vote Leave CEO was director of the Britain in Europe Campaign Ltd

This blog has consistently explained that all available evidence demonstrates that the Vote Leave campaign has no intention of Britain leaving the EU for good.

Instead it is clear that they are campaigning for a leave vote only to give leverage to David Cameron to help secure more EU reforms to remove the need for Brexit. This has been backed by mainstream media stories that explain what Dominic Cummings' game really is.

This has resulted in Cummings and Robert Oxley refusing to answer any points on Twitter. It has also resulted in Mark Wallace of Conservative Home claiming it is all a conspiracy theory, despite his inability to produce any evidence that defeats my argument.

Now we have information, publicly accessible on the Companies House website, showing that until 1st October 2015, the newly silent CEO of Vote Leave, Matthew Elliott, was a director of a limited company called The Britain in Europe Campaign Ltd.



We very quickly received a request sent via another blogger from a senior Tory politician and Vote Leave associate, to kindly please stop sharing this information on the internet. According to this person, The Britain in Europe Ltd name was purely a blocking move. There are a few problems with this person's assertion.

Firstly, why did Matthew Elliott only resign as one of its directors two weeks after Vote Leave was incorporated with Companies House? Second, why was he a director of it for four years when the company continues today with William Norton as sole director? Third. if the company was a blocking move, why has the 'britain-in-europe.com' internet domain, or variations of it, not been registered? Fourth, why are there not variations of the name in terms of limited companies?

Here we have a man...
  • whose every public utterance has been about EU reform, never about leaving the EU
  • who in June was declaring that if a two tier Europe (something akin to associate membership) was achieved he would support it
  • who has gone on the record setting out his entrepreneurial ambitions to harvest voter intentions and touchpoint issues on a database that can be sold
  • who has gone invisible since Vote Leave launched due to his position causing embarrassment to the position Vote Leave want people to think they hold
now shown to have been pushing a pro-EU membership reform line at Business for Britain, while also being a director of a company whose name, Britain in Europe Campaign Ltd, shows it advocates Britain remaining in the EU.

In any case, taking a company name doesn't block anything as the name of the limited liability entities rarely if ever is the same as the name of the campaign. There is no reason to have a company incorporated with that name unless the aim is to have it reserved for use.

Too much doesn't add up about Vote Leave. The more we scratch beneath the surface, the more we see reasons to believe it isn't about leaving the EU at all, rather it's a mere trojan horse for people with a pro-EU membership reform agenda. Vote Leave is not on the same side as those people who want Britain to leave the EU for good.