Tatler Tory at centre of election spending row
THE senior Conservative Party official at the heart of the Tory bullying scandal was last night implicated in the controversy over election spending limits.
Mark Clarke, known as the ‘Tatler Tory’, had been in charge of the party’s battle bus campaign in which supporters were driven into target seats ahead of last year’s General Election.
A leaked email shows he wrote to candidates and their teams to advise them how to declare spending on the campaign buses to the elections watchdog.
The email assured candidates that the party’s London head office would use national campaign funds to pay for the buses – though there is controversy over whether the money should instead have been counted as local expenditure.
Clarke said the bus had been signed off by senior Tory officials, including party chairman Lord Feldman and strategist Sir Lynton Crosby, and gave it the ‘full financial, organisational and practical support of CCHQ [Conservative Campaign Headquarters]’, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
It also said that CCHQ would ‘fund all activist refreshment’, with an estimated budget of £700 a day for food.
Ten police forces are examining Tory spending on last year’s General Election campaign amid allegations thousands of pounds were wrongly declared, in breach of electoral law. Deliberate breach of individual candidates’ spending limits – usually around £15,000 – is a criminal offence punishable by a fine or one-year jail term.
Any candidate found guilty would be barred from holding public office for three years, triggering a new election.
The Tory Party has admitted failing to declare £38,000 of hotel costs to the Electoral Commission, blaming an administrative error. Battlebus 2015 was the brainchild of Clarke, who was later accused of bullying Elliott Johnson, an activist who committed suicide last September. Clarke denies the allegations.
Clarke, who had been nicknamed the Tatler Tory after the society magazine tipped him for a Cabinet post, was thrown out of the party for life last year.
A party spokesman said: ‘The party always took the view that our national battle bus, a highly publicised campaign activity, was part of the national return.’
Last week it was revealed that emails showed Lord Feldman and Grant Shapps – then the party’s co-chairman – personally approved battle bus spending.