Just how impartial is the election umpire?

IT should go without saying that any evidence of candidates or parties breaking limits on election spending must be properly investigated.

But equally, it is vital to democracy that staff at the Electoral Commission, whose job is to ensure campaigns abide by the rules, must be scrupulously impartial.

Yet after the Crown Prosecution Service found no convincing evidence to charge the Tories with dishonest spending in 2015, grave doubts hang over the commission’s motives for pursuing the case.

How can this quango claim to be unbiased when Louise Edwards – its head of regulatory compliance, who prompted police inquiries into the allegations – has made her anti-Tory feelings so plain?

In 2010, she announced on Facebook that she did not want to live under a Conservative government. ‘What is wrong with people?’ she wrote. ‘Do they not remember the last time? Grrr! Words have failed me.’

With views like this, why was she ever employed by a quango responsible for seeing fair play? And why was she put in charge of following up claims against the Tories, raised by the Left-leaning Daily Mirror and publicly owned Channel 4?

True, the CPS found inaccuracies in some Conservative expenses returns. But all parties have been guilty of similar mistakes (though none has been punished as heftily as the Tories, who were fined a record £70,000 by the commission this spring).

As for criminal dishonesty, the law on battlebus expenses is such a grey area – and the sums involved so modest – that it should have been clear months ago there was no chance of making the charge stick.

Yet this inquiry dragged on for well over a year, wasting the time of 14 police forces and putting at least 30 candidates and agents under an undeserved cloud.

As we enter another election, hasn’t the commission serious questions to answer about its neutrality as an umpire?