Murky world of vot

iT IS the story that has it all: a smooth-talking Old Etonian, a Russian academic, a pink-haired Canadian whistleblower, Donald Trump’s estranged svengali, a Right-wing hedge-fund billionaire, a hard-nosed female watchdog, ex-Mossad agents… oh, and beautiful Ukrainian call girls.

Let’s take them in order. The Old Etonian is Alexander Nix, 42, a financial analyst-turned-election strategist who in 2013 decided there was money to be made in America by microtargeting voters via cutting-edge social media analysis.

He decided to call the new business Cambridge Analytica – Cambridge because of the Cambridge Universitytrained researchers who formed the backbone of the staff and Analytica presumably on the basis that anything Latin-sounding gave it a high-brow scientific air.

But the company’s services would stand or fall by the scale and quality of the data it drew on to fuel its services. Step forward Dr Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology lecturer at Cambridge, who unbeknown to the university was also an associate professor at the Russian University of St Petersburg.

Kogan owned a company called Global Science Research (GSR) which was behind an app called “thisisyourdigitallife” that compiled personal information from people based on what they liked on Facebook.

One of Cambridge Analytica’s employees at the time was a Canadian called Christopher Wylie and he approached Kogan with a datamining proposal. The upshot was that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica paid roughly 270,000 people to download his app and take a personality test.

In doing so the participants not only consented to their data being collected for academic use but also the profile information of their Facebook friends.

In harvesting the personal details of 50 million American voters in this way, Cambridge Analytica acquired just the competitive edge that it was looking for – it now had all the data it needed to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box

Backed to the tune of some $15million by the American hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer and with Steve Bannon – the man who was later to become President Donald Trump’s short-lived chief strategist – on board as vice president, the fledgling British outfit entered the US market.

tHERE it sold itself as what one commentator describes “the ultimate hi-tech consultant, winning votes by using data to pinpoint target groups and designing messages to appeal powerfully to their interests”. It proved to be a highly seductive pitch – the company became involved in no fewer than 44 US political campaigns in 2014 alone.

By the time the Republican primaries got under way a year later Cambridge Analytica’s status was such that it was hired by the presidential campaign of Texan senator Ted Cruz, one of the early front runners.

It divided voters into a set of six different types, from soccer mums to working dads, a process that enabled the Cruz camp to devise a variety of highly targeted direct-mail shots and digital ads, plus customised scripts for volunteers to use while contacting voters.

Despite this the Cruz campaign faltered. But far from bowing out of the race Cambridge Analytica moved on to work for the man who was to go all the way to the White House: the Donald himself.

Election night 2016 was a triumphant moment for a British company that was just a few years old. It was not long before the vultures began circling. In May last year Time magazine reported that Analytica was under investigation by the US Congress, linked to Russian attempts to influence the result of America’s election.

By December it had been revealed that former FBI chief Robert Mueller had requested that Cambridge Analytica turn over the emails of all of its employees who worked on the Trump campaign as part of his own investigation into claims of Russian interference.

Meanwhile Alexander Nix was summoned in front of the House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. In the course of his testimony in February he denied his company had made use of Facebook data, a statement that would return to haunt him.

But far worse was to follow. By now Christopher Wylie, who had left Analytica in 2014, was feeling guilty about his involvement in an operation that had been unethical if not more despicable. As he said this month: “You are playing