If you doubt the malign power of our quangocracy, consider the horrifying case of Alan Halsall. Halsall is the entrepreneur who bought Silver Cross Prams out of receivership and turned the company around. He is a big, enthusiastic, cheerful man, impossible to dislike.
Because Halsall happened to be the volunteer who signed off the paperwork for Vote Leave, he became a target for those who wanted to overturn the result – or, at the very least, to lash out at the winners.
And that impulse came, not only from Remain irreconcilables but, disgracefully, from organs of the British state. For four years – four years, think about that – Halsall’s life was turned upside down by what now looks like an obviously politicised investigation by the Electoral Commission.
The charges were trivial. No one was claiming that the amiable Lancastrian had connived to cheat, let alone engaged in false accounting. In effect, he was accused of filling in some paperwork incorrectly.
But that did not stop the Electoral Commission pursuing a vicious campaign against him which culminated in his hearing on the Today Programme, with only 15 minutes warning, that his file was being referred to the police – all the more astonishing because the Electoral Commission had declined to talk to anyone from Vote Leave (though it falsely claimed otherwise on air).
Eventually, the police found that he had no case to answer. But try to imagine what it is like, day after day, month after month, waking to the knowledge that you are under criminal investigation. Imagine what it is like to have to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds – far more than you would have been fined had you actually been guilty – clearing your name. The process is the punishment.
The whole sorry episode is recalled in Halsall’s memoir, Last Man Standing. It is a short book, cantering through his life before the referendum and the campaign itself before taking the reader matter-of-factly through the abominations that befell him afterwards.
The first part tells the story, not just of a man, but of a type of man. Halsall grew up in Southport in a family of engineers and entrepreneurs. These were gritty, industrious, patriotic people, closely involved with their communities, quick to volunteer when the call came. Alan is much affected by the story of his uncle Donald, who was killed in Norway in 1941.
Alan was never called on to volunteer for combat. But he rushed to offer his services when the referendum was called. He characteristically downplays his role in that campaign, but I recall his constant, morale-boosting presence at the Vote Leave HQ, where the young people running the campaign looked up to him as a kind of favourite uncle.
He managed to remain on good terms even with Dominic Cummings who, in a foreword, confesses to feeling guilty for talking Halsall into acting as Vote Leave’s agent:
“Because he took the job, his life was made a misery for years because of profoundly unfair, immoral and (in my view) unlawful persecution from parts of the state”.
Quite. We read here of the Electoral Commission complaining because, far from under-declaring its spending to stay within the limits, Vote Leave had superfluously included receipts for an event held after the poll. In other words, it had done the precise opposite of trying to cheat. The Electoral Commission’s pompous, hectoring and aggressive response would be funny were it not so serious:
“As these items were not Referendum spending, their inclusion in the return meant that it was not complete and accurate. The explanation provided by Vote Leave for this was that it was an honest error. This is not a reasonable excuse.”
You get the picture. This was not a neutral body disinterestedly seeking the truth. Rather, it was reasoning backwards from its prejudices, namely that Eurosceptics are dishonest people, and that there must be some technicality on which they can be tripped up.
I say “prejudices” because, as Halsall reveals here, the people involved in persecuting him had, prior to their appointment, left trails of evidence online of their anti-Tory and anti-Eurosceptic views.
Anyone looking at the thinness of what was being alleged – the most serious charge hinged on whether two bodies within the Vote Leave coalition had spent their budgets in a co-ordinated way – and the vindictiveness with which the investigation was being pursued would have seen immediately that this was a vexatious campaign, aimed at discrediting the referendum result.
But, of course, discrediting the referendum was precisely the aim of large sections of the media.
The charges were given exaggerated attention by the BBC, Sky News, and Channel 4 News, none of whom bothered to inform their viewers when they were dropped; in The Observer, Carole Cadwalladr was allowed to weave the investigation into her lurid fantasies about illicit Eurosceptic money.
Indeed, if you want a perfect symbol of the demented atmosphere of those days, consider that Cadwalladr, who ended up being successfully sued for falsely claiming that Leavers were connected to Russia, was not treated as a peddler of QAnon-style conspiracies, but instead won a dozen journalism awards because she was telling Remainers what they wanted to hear.
There is, you might say, nothing new about gutter journalism. But there is something new and terrifying about targeted partisanship by official state bodies.
To repeat, the process is the punishment. A quango can hire the most expensive lawyers and not care if it loses. It can refer you to the police, confident that it won’t be prosecuted for making false accusations. It can ruin you when you have done nothing wrong.
Isn’t that the sort of thing that happens in Russia or China? When did it become acceptable here? Or is it OK when the victims are people of whom our political, legal and media elites disapprove?
When the campaign was over, some Leavers had to carry on, un-thanked and unremunerated, batting away one asinine accusation after another. They will never get the recognition they deserve, but let us for once thank, alongside Halsall himself: Matt Elliott, Jon Moynihan, and Daniel Hodson, as well as Darren Grimes, who fought off similar charges as the leader of the Brexit youth campaign.
If you haven’t lived through these things, you can’t imagine what they are like. As a Eurosceptic MEP, I was forever dealing with fishing operations by the authorities, hoping to find some error in my accounting. Believe me, when you get a formal letter telling you that you are being investigated, the knowledge that you have done nothing wrong is little consolation.
Here is the story of an honest man who was falsely accused, lied about and nearly ruined, all because he had good-naturedly volunteered to do his bit in a democratic poll. When the referendum was over, plenty of people on the losing side came away with gongs. Alan Halsall got four years of hell. How can anything make up for those years? Where is our sense of justice?