Peter Geoghegan - Democracy for sale : dark money and dirty politics

DEMOCRACY
FOR SALE

A brilliant description of the dark underbelly of modern democracy: dark money, influence games and the new tactics of the new far-right. Everyone should read it.

ANNE APPLEBAUM ,
historian, author of Gulag and Red Famine

Peter Geoghegans investigations have been essential reading. Now this urgent, vital book is essential reading for anyone who wants to make sense of our politics.

CAROLE CADWALLADR ,
writer and winner of the Orwell Prize and Stieg Larsson Prize, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Theres a reason why follow the money is such a good rule for journalism: donations to political causes tell us what private interests are at play. Peter Geoghegans literally sterling work on the role of dark money in the Brexit upheaval is in the great tradition of investigative reporting. He follows the financial trails to reveal in compelling detail the nexus of international players for whom democracy is a game whose rules they could manipulate with impunity. Democracy for Sale is as urgent as it is illuminating.

FINTAN O TOOLE ,
author of Ship of Fools and Heroic Failure

Democracy, we are told, dies in darkness. This forensic and highly readable book shows how so many of our democratic processes have moved into the murky, unregulated spaces of globalisation and digital innovation. Its time society took a good look at them and decided whether this is the sort of democracy we want.

PETER POMERANTSEV ,
author of Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible and This is Not Propaganda

Geoghegan pulls off the ultimate goal of investigative writing. He not only exposes scandals he enables us to witness the system that generates the wrongdoing and permits it. He does so by linking what once seemed isolated outrages into a compelling and very readable story of the ongoing corruption of our government and therefore ourselves.

ANTHONY BARNETT ,
author of Iron Britannia and The Lure of Greatness

Peter Geoghegan is one of our best investigative journalists; his work is careful, sober, non-sensational, and terrifying. Democracy for Sale forensically exposes the fault lines in our politics, and reveals how they have been exploited by the rich and the powerful to further their own interests. If youre concerned about the health of British democracy, read this book it is thorough, gripping and vitally important.

OLIVER BULLOUGH ,
author of Moneyland

DEMOCRACY
FOR SALE

PETER
GEOGHEGAN

DEMOCRACY
FOR SALE

AN APOLLO BOOK

www.headofzeus.com

This is an Apollo book, first published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright Peter Geoghegan, 2020

The moral right of Peter Geoghegan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (FTP): 9781789546033

ISBN (E): 9781789546026

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For Mary

A book about the dark money that is warping our politics could begin in many places. Our starting point might be a tour of Westminster, stopping to peer through the windows of the Georgian townhouses where well-heeled political consultants and think tanks plot out election-winning strategies. We could stroll around the backstreets of the City of London, searching for insights into the murky world of offshore finance amid the brash, overflowing bars and restaurants. Or head straight to the global capital of undisclosed political influence, the sleek glass and steel sepulchres of Washington DCs corporate lobbying firms.

The genesis of this book took place somewhere less obvious: Seaburn metro station on the outskirts of Sunderland, on 21 June 2016. Two days before the UK voted to leave the European Union, my editor had sent me to report on what voters thought in Sunderland. It was a warm summers morning and there were only a handful of people on the open-air platform. I approached a middle-aged man with a soft face who was also waiting for the train to Newcastle.

How will you vote? I asked, falling into the only mode of conversation for a reporter in an unfamiliar place before a polling day. He wanted Brexit. He talked about pit closures and disinvestment, deindustrialisation and neglect. It was not hard to see why he felt politically abandoned. He had a particular worry about the EU: that Turkey would soon join. He talked about how millions of Turkish workers could soon be coming to the UK in search of jobs. I asked where he had heard about this. Facebook, he said.

A minute or two later the train arrived. I thanked my interlocutor for his time and sat down alone in an almost empty carriage. A well-thumbed copy of the free Metro lay on the adjacent seat. The front page was a wraparound advertisement calling on Britons to take back control, the slogan of the official Vote Leave campaign. I turned the paper over. An imprint on the back said that the advert had been paid for by the Democratic Unionist Party.

This was very curious. Since its foundation in 1971, the DUP had never run a single candidate outside Northern Ireland. Now it was splashing out on a massive ad campaign promoting Brexit in England. I knew that election spending in the UK is tightly capped. I also knew, having worked as a reporter in Belfast, that political donations to Northern Irish parties were kept secret under anachronistic local laws. Perhaps this was a way around campaign limits? I posted a photograph of the advert on Twitter, wondering aloud what was going on. Only a handful of people responded to my tweet.

Slowly, the suburban train cut through verdant countryside, past relics of former industrial glory. Sunderland was once, it is said, the largest shipbuilding town in the world. I forgot about the advert, opened my laptop and began drafting my report for the next days paper.

Sunderland was one of the first places to declare on referendum night. Over 60 per cent voted to leave the European Union. It was a result that set the tone for a stunning political upset. Through the night, pollsters struggled to explain a vote that defied their predictive models. The next morning, markets nose-dived. The resignation of the prime minister, David Cameron, was only the third item on many news bulletins. The ensuing years of chaos laid bare the fault lines of modern Britain and have changed Europe forever.

In the months that followed the Brexit vote, my mind kept returning to Seaburn station. How could the Democratic Unionists, a tiny party in the context of British politics, afford to buy hugely expensive ads in northern English newspapers? Why were voters in Sunderland seeing stories on Facebook about Turkey joining the EU? Who was paying for all this? My colleagues and I would spend much of the next three years asking such questions.

We found answers, but rarely those we had expected. The DUPs advertising blitz was bankrolled by the biggest donation in Northern Irish history, routed through a secretive Scottish group linked to a former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence. The Vote Leave campaign led by its ruthless chief strategist Dominic Cummings broke electoral laws on overspending when it bought highly targeted Facebook adverts with a Canadian digital company that almost nobody had heard of. Arron Banks, an insurance broker with interests in gold mines and a sprawling business empire registered in tax havens around the world, had become the biggest campaign donor in British electoral history. Banks was eventually investigated and exonerated by the National Crime Agency, amid concerns about the sources of his record Brexit contributions.