‘Lawmaker broke campaign spending rules’

LONDON: A lawmaker from British Prime Minister Theresa May’s minority ruling Conservative Party deliberately made false declarations over his spending in a 2015 election, a prosecutor told a London court on Tuesday.

Craig Mackinlay, 52, who beat leading Brexit figure Nigel Farage in the parliamentary election for South Thanet in southeastern England in 2015, earlier this year pleaded not guilty to the charges.

“Far from being complete and inaccurate, the (expenses) returns were woefully incomplete and woefully inaccurate, and deliberately so,” Prosecutor Aftab Jafferjee said in his opening of the case.

Mackinlay appeared at Southwark Crown Court alongside his election agent Nathan Gray and Marion Little, a campaign director from Conservative head office, who both also deny charges over the expense returns. Jafferjee said the three shared responsibility for the submission of inaccurate election expenses returns, and that Mackinlay was not an innocent bystander in what unfolded.

Certain “notional” spending was omitted from expense returns when it should have been included, he said, such as the salaries of Gray and Little, which were paid for by Conservative headquarters in London.

Little’s defence, that she was working on the national campaign to defeat Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP), didn’t fit with the central role she played in Mackinlay’s operation, Jafferjee said, adding that the importance of beating Farage meant it “was clear that this was not going to be any ordinary election campaign.”

“The primary objective was clearly to get Craig Mackinlay elected and defeat Nigel Farage,” Jafferjee said.

“She was there for one purpose: vote Craig Mackinlay, not vote Conservative generally. Craig Mackinlay knew that.” The 2015 election saw Mackinlay beat Farage, the former head of UKIP, into second place by 2,812 votes.