We’re closing the live blog now, with questions finished and Banks and Wigmore off to lunch.
Here’s Jim Waterson’s take on what we learned:
'Agents provocateurs' caught in their own trap
Over an occasionally fiery three hours, Andy Wigmore and Arron Banks faced down the DCMS committee’s questions over Banks’ insurance business, dealings with Russia, and abortive collaborations with Cambridge Analytica and the University of Mississippi.
Repeating a pattern started by the Cambridge Analytica chief executive, Alexander Nix, in his own evidence to the committee, Banks went on the attack, arguing that the committee was fatally flawed by its reliance on the evidence of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblowers, the “fantasist” Brittany Kaiser and Chris Wylie. Banks also attacked the committee itself, arguing that it was staffed entirely by remainers who wanted to push for a second referendum and were failing to apply equal pressure to his opponents.
But both Wigmore and Banks were undercut in their rage by their repeated admissions that they had “exaggerated” the truth over the course of the referendum campaign in order to “provoke and generate discussion” about Leave.EU. One exasperated MP noted that “as we’ve seen a lot in this committee, very well-placed sources suddenly throw their hands up and say ‘I got it all wrong’ or ‘I lied through my teeth’.”
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Damian Collins tries to call Ian Lucas for another question, but Banks refuses to take it, saying he’s got an appointment for lunch that he doesn’t want to be late for. He stands up to leave, with Collins asking for one more question.
“The word is no. When we went out, you said 20 minutes, and I think we’ve run past it.” Banks walks out while the cameras are still running, and Collins, looking perturbed at losing control, ends the hearing.
Matheson asks how much money Banks gave to the leave side of the referendum. Banks “doesn’t have the information”, Matheson quotes £9.6m at him, and Banks doesn’t confirm or deny.
Matheson asks about an extra £12m that the Guardian said was lent in kind. Banks says a correction in the online version of the story has altered that figure.
Banks goes on the attack: “That does rather illustrate the point, doesn’t it? You read a Guardian report that has a wilfully misleading headline, and you believe it’s true. But then they correct it, they bury the correction on the website, and you don’t see that. You then ask me a question based on it, and you spread fake news.”
Matheson: “I take that, but earlier, you both talked about how you like to tease, to embellish.”
Banks: “If we didn’t approach this with some sense of humour, we’d get locked up.”
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Matheson: “When you’re having these business dealings with Russia, did you ever have any threatening brushes with Russian organised crime?”
Banks: “My only discussion was the one meeting with the guy mentioned in the Sunday Times… In business you have many conversations. A lot of them never lead to anything. Just because you have lunch with someone, or a discussion, does not mean it leads on.”
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Chris Matheson asks why Wigmore got involved in Brexit, if he’s a diplomat: “I love this country, I love Belize. I had the ability to help my small country, which I love. For me, the EU could mean huge great things and opportunities for my small country I love. You try and help your small country lobby MPs and MEPs. And the Commonwealth is hugely helpful for that.”
Wigmore says that most of the conversation at the meeting with the Russian ambassador was about his father, who had been based in West Berlin during the cold war. “We talked about that, we got trolleyed, it was fantastic.”
“I don’t feel comfortable” now about the relationships with Russia, he says, “but at the time there were none of those concerns.”
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Banks says the committee asking about the published emails is “ironic, given the inquiry about stolen data. I’m not sure it’s even appropriate to be asking about them.”
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Banks offers “one final thing”. “In the meantime we were slightly worried – not worried but thinking that we ought to make sure that we absolutely keep people informed of what we’re doing …”
Wigmore jumps in: “What happened, a document was published by the Atlantic Council in the US. This document went into how they believed Russian influence, across the world. In this document they looked at Nigel Farage, Douglas Carswell of all people. They then did a press conference when they reiterated that Arron Banks was a Russian agent.
“What then subsequently happened, we got accused of all sorts of things with relation to Russia. It’s at that point that you start to take the mickey, start to think this is absurd, do what I did with journalists, because you think how can they believe that.
“We thought it was important, if we were going to be involved in any way with the president’s team, to be clear. The person that gave us the best advice was the former chief of staff of David Cameron’s office, who said you need to go to the US embassy and you need to tell them things.
“We met on numerous occasions. They went to meet Paul Nuttall, and to meet Nigel Farage. I arranged that meeting, they had a good chat, we continued that communication any time we thought there was something that we needed to know.”
Wigmore holds up a brown envelope on which he has written “Top Secret”, and says it contains all the information the committee needs to know.
Banks: “I think what we’re trying to say is that we briefed the American security services on everything that has transpired.”
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Banks says he did meet with the Russian businessman who was suggesting he invest in six goldmines. He then met with another expert who said “‘be very careful dealing with Russia, but if you are interested, go and see my friend’. He said, it lasted 40 minutes, ‘be very careful’.”
Banks says the Guardian did say the deal went ahead, but that he has “no clue what deal they’re talking about”.
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Wigmore adds that he “often used to tease journalists by answering, when they asked where Arron was, that he was in Moscow, or Russia.”
Wigmore repeats again that he’s being “provocative”. Stevens asks him: “What’s the difference between provocative and lying?” He says that he’s “allowed to have a sense of humour”.
Collins points out to Banks that “not for the first time, Mr Wigmore is the source of confusion. If your press man just told the truth, we wouldn’t be here!”
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Collins returns to the Russia story that broke at the weekend. “You can probably see that one of the reasons why this has attracted the attention is that this discloses events that weren’t in your book. Why wasn’t more of this in that?”
Banks: “At the last page of the book, by that stage, my only meeting was that lunch with the ambassador. I wrote about it in the book, I gave, those emails stolen from Oakeshott, I gave them to her. So if I was hiding it I was doing a bad job.”
Banks then takes the opportunity to address the Sunday Times’ story: “They say I went to Moscow in February for a meeting. They contacted me when I was at a cricket match. I subsequently went back and looked at my passports, at my Russian visas. There are two Russian visas, so effectively, the Russian visa – first one was March 15, and second one was October 14. So I wasn’t in Moscow in February 16. I’ve got fairly definitive proof that no, I didn’t.
“I also went back in and printed my office diary. The only thing in the note is that in February we got a donation from Roger Hargreaves.
“The reason I keep a second passport is that on one occasion my wife stole my passport when I was about to go off on a trip she didn’t approve of, so now my PA keeps a second one.”
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We’re back. Collins asks Banks why he donated to Ukip to pay a bill from Cambridge Analytica. Why did he believe that bill needed to be paid?
Banks: “CA had done some work to Ukip, so I thought they would have to pay. They disagreed.”
Collins: “You didn’t ask for the money back?”
Banks: “No. Put it this way: we knew they had sent the data to CA, and that they were meant to be doing a scoping exercise, which they had done. I made the donation, but it was Ukip that had to settle the bill.”
Wigmore adds: “In context, there had just been a general election where they hadn’t done very well. So this was part of the regenesis.”
Collins: “This project, this Ukip project, has nothing to do with you, so why did you feel you had to settle the bill?”
Banks: “I chose to make a donation. I donated it to Ukip. Whether they disclosed it or should have disclosed it, I have no visibility.”
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Collins pulls the committee into a short recess – to go and vote on the EU withdrawal bill. A few more questions will follow in about 15 minutes, he says.
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Banks: “You look at Obama, he won off the back of his social media campaign. All the liberal people thought that was a fantastic thing and he’d discovered gold dust.”
Knight asks what the pair think more generally of Cambridge Analytica.
Wigmore: “What they were doing in politics is really not unusual. And by the way there are a hundred other Cambridge Analyticas out there. And in consumer marketing, they are nothing special.”
Banks: “I think they were an ad agency with a very slick story. They got involved overseas with very odd things, though, and no one can approve of that, surely.”
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Julian Knight, Conservative, asks why Banks thinks Kaiser is a “fantasist”.
Banks notes that the day after her DCMS testimony she launched a new campaign, “rest in peace personal data”, so she has “every motivation to fantasise”.
But he says the thing that struck him as oddest was her claim that she had worked with WikiLeaks on a cryptocurrency business. “I’m not saying it was incorrect that she was called, but I find it quite odd if she was an honest employee of the company who was shocked by the behaviour of the management that she then went to Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy.
“She said that she visited an insurance call centre and that staff were mingling and working between the two [insurance and Leave.EU], but our insurance call centre is in Durban, South Africa. It is not possible to have visited an insurance call centre in Bristol. There are no operational calls taken in Bristol.
“She had obviously heard something about Mississippi and pumped out that information.”
Banks turns to the other major whistleblower from Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie: “He is saying that three months ago he had emails that were stolen from us, that were stolen from Isabel Oakeshott. If these people are honest whistleblowers, why is he saying he’s got our emails and are passing them on to British and foreign intelligence?
“It all really comes from two witnesses that really do lack credibility.”
Collins notes that it actually all started from a data breach involving Cambridge Analytica “that has now been validated by Facebook”.
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Rebecca Pow quickly asks if Eldon employees were loaned to the Labour leave campaign, and Wigmore says no. She asks why an Eldon employee registered “LabourLeave.org”, and Wigmore says they “registered hundreds of domains”.
Banks adds: “We probably had an area of the business that just registers domain names. You’ve got me on that one. I don’t know who it was. If I remember correctly, the Labour leave emails and websites were blocked by Vote Leave in an attempt to try and make them come back to their offices.
“If you want to give me the details, I’ll look into who registered the domains.”
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Collins pushes further on the Big Data Dolphins project: “When did Victoria” – an employee of Banks’ in charge of leading the project – “go out to Mississippi?”
Banks says “she’s gone over there, she’s come back…”
Collins produces an email dated October 2017, which Banks says “sounds about right. She’s been going out on an ad-hoc basis, working with the university then comes back.”
Collins asks if it’s possible Mississippi could have remote access to British data, and both Wigmore and Banks confidently deny it.
Collins: “It’s now a matter for the judge in Mississippi about what happens next, and that’s that.”
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Banks attacks Brittany Kaiser as “a fantasist” and argues that the committee has been used by the Fair Vote campaign to push for a second referendum, in particular due to the publication of recordings by academic Emma Bryant. “If you see it from my point of view, we’re passionate Brexiters. The committee is less keen on the result. This Fair Vote project is actually a campaign on a second vote. What interest has the ICO got in backing a second referendum?”
Wigmore: “The ICO’s even thanking you … that thanks was conveniently given to the court at exactly the same time as this evidence was released to the public.”
Banks: “You can see it from my point of view. The Fair Vote project is a second referendum campaign, backed by Byline who have been repeatedly and viciously attacking us, with the Guardian … it doesn’t look very good. So from my point of view, in all of this it gets dreadfully complicated, you have to say it’s a second referendum campaign, and you look like you’re supporting it.”
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O’Hara asks if Eldon has scraped data from Facebook, Banks says no: “This project has not even started. Even if we may have had the intention to look at Facebook scraping, we’ve not yet done it.
“When you’re in business, you go through all of the possible things you might look at. My understanding of this whole issue is that multiple commerical interests have a) done it or b) thought about doing it.
“You can ask what was your intention, why did you think about it, but at the end of the day, we haven’t done it. We looked at a whole range of commercial applications. To say ‘you intended to do it’, well, in business you look at a whole range of possibilities.
“No data has been sent to Mississippi. The project hasn’t even started! Categorically: we hadn’t even met with people from Mississippi until the Republican National Convention after Brexit had happened.
“I’ve seen no evidence, all the hearsay of he-said and she-said, where is the evidence that we’ve sent data to Mississippi?”
O’Hara: “Well, as we’ve seen a lot in this committee, very well-placed sources suddenly throw their hands up and say ‘I got it all wrong’, or ‘I lied through my teeth’.”
Wigmore – who is the source O’Hara is talking about here – again notes: “I’m an agent provocateur, not the underwear, and my job is to provoke, it’s to spin stories. You’ve all got PR, you know this.”
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Banks and Wigmore again turn the tables on the committee, arguing that the partnership still isn’t off the ground, and that the only reason anyone has begun reporting it is that Brittany Kaiser told the committee previously that they had shared referendum data with Big Data Dolphins, “based on hearsay”.
The resulting court case, Banks says, “has led to everyone getting up on the stand to say there is not yet a business, there is not yet any project. It is a live project, but… after all this, the University of Mississippi is probably not going to go ahead with it.”
Brendon O’Hara asks about Big Data Dolphins, a company created by Banks in Mississippi to look at insurance fintech. “That is how the stuff comes about, creating a … let’s put it this way, Big Data Dolphins is our AI unit for use in the insurance industry.”
O’Hara: “So what is the relationship between BDD and Eldon?”
Banks: “Eldon is an insurance broker, BDD is a company set up to do AI and analytics in the insurance industry. The plan was to hire graduates and people like that to work on our insurance big data project.
“AI can be used in such a way as to know whether someone’s about to renew a policy from the data of the person. There’s all sorts of things you can learn.”
Watling asks: “And in Mississippi, what does Banks have there?”
Banks: “Basically, there’s nothing in Mississippi, we have no staff, we have an empty office, and it was a project with the university which was meant to go live about a year ago, but it’s been delayed, delayed, delayed.”
Watling: So why did Wigmore say there was something happening there?
Banks: “Mr Wigmore got it wrong, unfortunately … he was referring to our Bristol operation, and our plans for a big data unit in Mississippi.”
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One last question from Watling: “Did you accept money from Russia?”
Wigmore: “No. Nyet.”
Banks and Wigmore describe how they ended up meeting Donald Trump on the night of the US election. Wigmore: “This young girl on the transition desk, she said you’re British, do you have the number of 10 Downing Street? So, with astonishment, I gave it to her, I said that’s what we’ve got. I said to her, what if someone wants to get in touch with you. She said here you go.
“I met lots of the diplomatic community I’ve known for a long time, they wanted to know, they’d seen the picture [of Wigmore and Banks with Trump], and they wanted to know how to get in touch. And when we went to see the Russian ambassador, he was surprised as well. He said do you have a number, I said I did, he disappeared for about 10 minutes, and then he came back and said thank you very much for that.
“Nobody thought he’d win!
“Meeting Trump was not planned. We saw Kellyanne Conway, it wasn’t planned, she said do you want to see the boss, and we said of course. So we spent a lovely hour and a half with the president-elect.”
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Watling: “I’d like to move on to big scary Russia. I get the point that if the Russian ambassador asks you round for a drink you go, but this relationship went on for quite some time. What were you hoping to get out of it?”
Banks: “A good lunch, and that’s what I got.”
Watling: “Many good lunches?”
Banks: “Many good lunches.”
Wigmore: “The first was the best.”
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Giles Watling: “Do you think that the breakup of the rest of the EU is in Britain’s best interest now?”
Banks: “My belief is that it is. There’s been a tumultuous movement across Britain, and America, where there’s this desire to change. When we talk about staying in the single market, it’s almost like being in prison with the door open and the prisoner’s afraid to leave their cell. There’s been 45 years of brainwashing, and it’s going to collapse in on itself.”
Watling: “Will Britain leaving prompt that breakup?”
Banks: “I don’t know. The relationship between Britain and the EU has always been a square peg in a round hole … but the Eurosceptic vote is rising, not falling, in those other countries.”
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Collins asks about international collaboration between Eurosceptic movements. Wigmore says he went to visit “someone in France”, and Banks adds that, before the referendum, “there was some meetings with the Five Star Movement” in Italy.
But Banks says: “If there were a second referendum, I don’t think I’d be involved in it. Frankly, if I could go back on this one, I might not do that again.”
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Banks describes the Leave.EU’s broad tactics: “We knew that the thing to do was focus on three or four issues … but I think where Andy’s over-egged the pudding was to say that there were data scientists.
“One of the big issues was not just targeting. The vote was won on getting the turnout of people who cared strongly about leave. Dominic Cummings will argue that Farage was toxic, and that might have been true in the Home counties, but taking him to places where he was drove turnout.
“We had at this stage over a million people following us.”
Collins: “You would use location data of people who signed up?”
Wigmore: “Google Analytics, it’s nothing more.”
Banks: “If we did it again, we probably wouldn’t overstate our data.”
Wigmore: “We were probably a bit boastful.”
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Stevens turns back to Eldon Insurance, Banks’s main business. “How successful was it?”
Banks, annoyed, corrects her: “Is. It is successful.” He lists the thousands of employees Eldon has around the world.
Stevens: “I looked at some review and comparison websites for the products … you’ve got some of the worst rankings in the country.
Banks: “I don’t believe that’s correct.”
Stevens: “Well, it is on the ones I looked at.”
Banks: “It’s a grudge purchase. You look at anybody’s feedback, it’s not normally favourable.”
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Stevens asks about the official Labour Leave campaign. “Did you have any relationship with them?”
Wigmore says that “some MPs fell out with the Vote Leave movement. [Kate] Hoey, she jumped ship … they still had Giselle Stuart and a couple of others. But these individuals were happy to work with us. Officially, they were still with the Vote Leave campaign.”
Banks: “Kate Hoey fell out with Vote Leave … and we gave them an office with us in Millbank.”
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Jo Stevens asks more questions about data-sharing between insurance businesses and Leave.EU, which Banks “categorically denies”.
“By the way, no one’s produced one shred of evidence that this happened. If we go to that very question, there was a big article by Carole Cadwalladr ...” Wigmore notes that the Observer journalist is in the audience, and both men turn to say hi.
Banks: “There was a big article by Carole, who found that we held her data. Because she’d done a comparison. We quote on 35 million people a year. The fact is, she wrote a completely fallacious argument, that, ‘oh, money supermarket,’ the fact is it’s completely untrue. She says we held the data so we must have used it.”
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Lucas: “Did you believe what you were saying?”
Banks: “Of course. You go back to Trump, to Brexit, the problem is we had open-door mass migration. My belief is we should have had moderated normal immigration, of 60,000, 70,000 a year. But no parties cared: Labour didn’t care because it meant more voters for them, and the Tories didn’t care because it meant cheap labour.
“Did we go over the top? Probably. But remember, we were given the job of keeping Nigel and Ukip in the game, because Vote Leave were going to try and Toryise the whole thing. To think it was a chaotic campaign would be wrong. It was ruthlessly executed in a businesslike way.”
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Lucas: “What I want to know is: in what way were you using social media? There are two things really, there’s the creative aspect, the content, that you’ve touched on, but there’s also the data.”
Wigmore: “There’s a simplicity to this, let me give you a bit of colour … The knowledge of marketing, the knowledge of social media, were quite mature.
Banks: “How does social media get traction? That’s what you’ve got to consider. My experience with social media is it’s a firestorm, like a bushfire, that blows over everything. Our skill was creating bushfires and then putting a fan on that would just blow it over everything. Our skill was picking subjects and topics that would just make the campaign fly.
“You had to figure out what the pressure points were that made things fly, and that’s what we did.”
Wigmore: “Look at President Trump: the more outrageous he was, the more attention he got, the more attention he got the more outrageous he was. And there’s a similarity there, and I don’t apologise for it, because the only way were were going to get attention was to be talked about.”
Banks: “We took a decision at the beginning of the campaign, we were still talking about the economy in the last week of the campaign, and we had to keep on-topic if you like, and so that’s why at the end the two campaigns were effective: you had Boris [Johnson] and [Michael] Gove talking about sovereignty, and the immigration issue set the world on fire.”
Wigmore: “Our polling said this was an emotive issue that people wanted to hear about.”
Banks: “What we were given the job of was essentially pushing Vote Leave to get the campaign started. They hated us for it because we terrorised them. In the end, you had two campaigns, one that was pushing the other as hard as it could. Immigration was the message we were sticking to, and we ruthlessly stuck to our message.”
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Lucas: “You said you wanted to bring the skills of the insurance industry to the campaign. How did you do that?”
Banks: “You’ve got two parts of the referendum, you’ve got the short period, and then you’ve got the run-up, before the spending limits kick in, when it’s open season. Within our office, we had an office set up for Leave.EU, which was a call centre. As part of that what we had was a creative department that basically created Facebook tiles and Twitter.
“We were able to create some of the stuff that was in real time and topical quicker than anybody else. I think that’s much more relevant to how you get traction on social media. We had one video that got 14m views.
“If you look at our top 10 videos, the top one was over 10m and then there were a whole number of videos that had more.
“I can understand why you can’t get to the truth: you think that data is driving some magical profiling, you know, ‘look into my eyes, look into my eyes’, but actually that’s not what it is.”
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Lucas: “Are you familiar with Aggregate IQ?”
Banks: “No.”
Wigmore: “I think the first time I heard their name was watching your committee.”
Lucas: “It’s interesting that Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU, which was connected to AIQ, both had a relationship to Vote Leave. You don’t know why AIQ is so special?”
Banks: “I don’t think it is. I think it’s an ad agency.”
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Lucas turns back to Cambridge Analytica: “Can you explain the work it did for UKIP?”
Banks: “I can. I did earlier.”
Wigmore: “You [Banks] don’t even really know anyone there.”
Banks: “They took some data to do a pilot there, Ukip decided that the work wasn’t worth a penny, that there wasn’t any work done, and that they wouldn’t pay it.”
Lucas: “Did you give them money to pay it?”
Banks: “I did, but they decided not to pay it and kept the money … I think they were short of funds and decided it was better used elsewhere.”
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Lucas: “What do you think first attracted the Russian embassy to Arron Banks, the biggest political donor in UK history? Do you think it was the fact that you were involved in the Brexit campaign?”
Wigmore answers: “I’ll tell you why, because I asked to meet them. We thought it would be nice to meet them, because [Arron’s] wife is from the Russian diaspora.”
Banks adds: “Ian, if the French ambassador called up and asked to meet you for lunch, you’d go. It would be nice! What I’m saying is, we’ve now got a full-scale Russian witch-hunt going on, but before that it wasn’t an issue.”
Wigmore jumps back: “Can I explain why I met them? I’m a diplomat for a small country called Belize … it needed someone to buy its bananas. It wasn’t anything to do with the referendum.”
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Banks, Wigmore and Labour’s Ian Lucas have a small shouting match, as Lucas attempts to ask about an investigation into Banks’ insurance companies, and Banks says he will not answer it.
Wigmore jumps in to argue that the questions have no relevance, before Banks angrily answers: “I have not been trading insolvently for three years, because the regulator would not allow that to happen. How on earth can an insurance company trade insolvently for three years?
“This committee’s supposed to be investigating fake news in politics. What Mr Lucas is doing is using parliamentary privilege to make a reckless allegation that he knows will be reported elsewhere.”
Lucas asks a further question about Banks not having approval to run an insurance company. Banks responds: “What is this? Are you the MP who got drunk in the House of Commons and embarrassed himself at a karaoke? No? Because one of you is.
“The reason I’m slightly vexated about this is. because I answered the question to Ms Pow ... Mrs Pow ... Rebecca. What happens to insurance companies is not that they’re insolvent, it’s that the claims ratio gets reassessed. And when it gets reassessed, the regulators say you’ve got to inject more money into the company to continue trading. I think if you thought about your question … that actually, the fact of the matter is that when we identified what had to be injected in, we injected it in.
“It happened because of personal injury claims that were coming out of the woodwork because of accident management companies. You had a scandal because of lawyers ringing people from industrial numbers generating personal injury claims.”
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“I’m frankly sick and tired of this,” Banks says. “You’ve got a vested interest in trying to discredit the Brexit campaign. Look, you’ve not called any witnesses from the remain campaign to hammer them. If Mr [George] Osborne, editor of the Evening Standard, isn’t going to any football matches with Putin’s number one man, he’s certainly working for Putin’s second man.
“The guy leading the remain campaign is working for a Putin oligarch in London. If you can’t see double standards, I don’t think that’s fair.”
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“I like to think I’m an evil genius with a white cap who controls all of democracy, but clearly that’s not true,” Banks says with a grin, before getting more frustrated:
“By the way, you keep mentioning different names. This is a wonderful piece of Guardian’s fake news. What they’ve done is go through the documents at Companies House, and Companies House frequently makes mistakes. When you say ‘different names’, it’s my name, so I can’t see where it comes from. It just says Arron Banks, sometimes misspelled with two As, or in some cases it uses my middle name.
“Now you just brought it up, because that is exactly how fake news works. You say ‘you used seven different version in Companies House’ – well actually, it’s just my name, or my middle name. It’s a complete non-story.
“If you don’t like my structure, don’t lecture me about offshore tax structures or complexity – change the law!”
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Banks: “The Guardian wrote an article saying that we had income of £19m and expenses of £21m … actually, that’s the payroll. It’s a sort of services company that does administration. When Better for the Country [the company that ran the Leave.EU campaign] was lent money, I lent money but it was Rock Services that delivered it. We don’t approve of the Electoral Commission’s interpretation of this, so we’re straying into territory that [is sub judice].
“I will cover it, although obviously our appeal has been lodged today. Effectively, the loan agreement was between BFTC and myself. Rock Services is the company that just delivered the cash, it’s a services company. I’m a UK taxpayer, I made the loan out of my own funds.
“They say that I should have said the money came from Rock Services whereas actually I said it came from me. Usually it’s the other way round, people trying to hide behind companies. Because of the legal action, all of the documents are available where we’re challenging those findings.”
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Rebecca Pow starts trying to drill down on the corporate structure of Banks’s portfolio.
Banks: “If you ask me to describe every company and how it interacts with every other company, I might not be able to do that.”
Pow asks further questions about ICS and Southern Rock, prompting a clarification from Banks: “You’re saying a company I own, ICS, is propping up another company I own? If it was insolvent, it wouldn’t be able to trade. What you’re really saying is that ICS Holdings, which I own, lent some money to another company I own. The regulators, we put in place what’s called a restoration plan. It’s quite normal in insurance.
“We were asked, required, to put more capital into the insurance business … and that money came from another company I owned. So I’m struggling to see what the killer question here is.”
Pow continues: “Companies House asked you to publish the accounts of ICS Risk Solutions, have they not?” Banks: “No. If you’re giving me new information, I don’t know, but we have not been asked to do that.
“Returning to the point of the £77m into Southern Rock, it was money that went from one company I own to another company I own … if you look at a company like Aviva or Direct Line … virtually every UK insurance company had to put money into their insurance company.”
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Matheson prompts some dissent between Wigmore and Banks, asking about an earlier quote from Wigmore that he had “actuaries” working on the Leave.EU campaign. Banks now says that there was some “conflation”, and that those actuaries didn’t actually work on the campaign. Wigmore starts to describe the sort of work actuaries could do, and where they may come from, before Banks cuts him off to again say there were no actuaries working on the campaign.
“Winning an election isn’t about facts, it’s about emotion,” Wigmore says. The pair are hammering home part of their defence, here, which seems to be that a substantial chunk of what they previously said was exaggeration designed to raise emotions and create talking points during the referendum.
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Chris Matheson asks if any information was shared with Cambridge Analytica. Banks says Ukip handed over some data for a “scoping exercise”, which left them unsatisfied, so they didn’t pay the invoice – and neither did he.
“I never had a role in Ukip,” he adds. “We wanted to professionalise the party, which some of them took exception to. We talked strategy with Nigel [Farage] all the time, but that’s what politicians do.”
Matheson quotes from Banks’s book, that says Leave.EU “had partnered” with Cambridge Analytica. Banks clarifies that “we put them into the designation document”, which we already knew. “When we said we hired Cambridge Analytica, maybe a better sense of words would be ‘deployed’: we put them in the designation document, saying that if we won the designation, we would hire them.”
Matheson further quotes: “We made no secret of using Cambridge Analytica”, and adds from a Wigmore interview with the Observer “they were happy to help us because Nigel is friends with Mercer”.
Matheson: “And now we’ve got that Cambridge Analytica is simply an ad agency. In the words of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, is that your final answer?”
Wigmore admits he’s an “agent provocateur, I’m guilty of slight exaggeration in the message. The truth is we put out, in the document, did we use CA in the pitch? Yes. Did they do some work before the pitch? Yes.”
Banks adds: “We certainly weren’t afraid of leading journalists up the country path, the same with politicians … the same if you get Dominic Cummings on the stand … I think you have to take a slight pinch of salt, because we were running a campaign deliberately aimed at making fun of people, pushing them in a certain direction.”
Matheson: “Does that include also making fake news to wind people up?”
Banks: “I would say, Chris, that parliament itself is the biggest source of fake news in the country … straight after this hearing you’ll be at lunch with some Guardian journalist quaffing a glass of chablis and spinning this how you want.”
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Collins asks Banks about his and Wigmore’s very public dispute with Alexander Nix back in March, when the CA CEO denied ever working with Leave.EU and the Leave.EU team “took considerable exception to that”.
Banks says now that “one of the issues I had was the verbal offer they made that ‘if you pay us $1m up front, we’ll raise $5m’. That’s when it clicked that he was a bit of a fraud … this was an ad agency that was just overplaying its hand. That’s why I felt a bit angry with him.”
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Banks explains that he attended the meeting with Cambridge Analytica “wearing lots of hats”. He says: “The three things that were of interest to me were, obviously the referendum campaign, my insurance business … and thirdly with the Ukip hat on, could it be a useful messaging tool for Ukip. There’s no conflict there.”
“With us sitting around the committee, there’s a lot of hindsight here. The fact of the matter is that we’ve got to be careful in examining all of this that we don’t go from ‘we examined the possibility’ to ‘it happened’. It’s a bit like the gold mine stuff, it’s a bit like the Guardian stuff: just because there’s a proposal, doesn’t mean there’s any wrongdoing.” (Banks here is referring to his meeting with Russian officials that led to the proposition that he invest in a Russian gold mine, reported in the Observer this weekend.)
“From our point of view, what we’ve said is: we had some meetings with Cambridge Analytica which didn’t lead to anything. So I don’t really get these questions.”
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Collins turns to Aggregate IQ, trying to disentangle the relationship between them and CA. Banks doesn’t offer much, but does return to why they rejected CA: “I think, as we saw in the Channel 4 exposé, [Nix] made a lot of claims about what his company can do … I got the definite feeling that he was just an ad agency.”
Wigmore interjects: “This claim that we can just hypnotise people is rubbish.”
Banks: “We did our own ‘micromessaging’, if you like: we targeted at Green voters, for instance, about poor African countries that can’t import their goods into the UK.”
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Banks: “I think we won the referendum because there were two campaigns. Vote Leave was appealing to the soft Tories, while we were appealing to the Labour voters for whom migration is a huge issue.”
Upon meeting with Cambridge Analytica, Banks says, “it became clear that there was a lot of sizzle but not much substance”.
Wigmore adds: “When you market an insurance company … it’s marketing. You’re talking about pay-per-click, Google ads. All we did was apply that knowledge in marketing in insurance to politics, because it’s what we knew … here, we believed CA were perceived as one of the best political campaigning companies. The truth is, our marketing people actually knew more than they did.”
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Collins opens with questions about Leave.EU’s connections with Steve Bannon (Banks met him), Robert Mercer (Banks didn’t meet him) and Cambridge Analytica: “It was proposed that they were experts in data analytics, and they made a pitch to us. [The Electoral Commission’s] report shows there is no evidence that we went ahead with the pitch.”
Collins prefaces a question with “Dominic Cummings wrote in his blog yesterday”, prompting an interjection from Banks: “I don’t think you can trust everything Dominic Cummings writes. I think he suggested I should be thrown down a mineshaft … it’s fairly on the record that we despise Dominic Cummings, Matthew Elliot, and other people who tried to turn [the leave campaign] into a wing of the Tory party.
“I think there’s a lot of myth around this,” Banks says. “It’s one of the issues of the committee: there’s a lot of taking witnesses, hearing what they have to say, and turning it into fact … What we would maintain is that of these key honest whistleblowers, you’ve got [Brittany Kaiser] saying she was meeting Julian Assange, you’ve got Chris Wylie saying he’s been in receipt of stolen emails of ours with three months … this investigation has been conflated by two witnesses whose credibility has been shot to pieces.”
“That’s your view,” Collins says, “and you’re entitled to it.”
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We’re off, a few minutes late. Damian Collins welcomes Banks and Wigmore, noting “for the record” that the two have freely agreed to come and give evidence, without a summons.
He also mentions that the pair have lodged a complaint with the Electoral Commission about their investigation, and that he won’t be asking about that issue, since it is sub judice.
Wigmore responds on the attack immediately, asking that Collins recuse himself as chair of the inquiry since he took hospitality from “Putin’s number one man in London” – in the form of a trip to watch Chelsea play football.
“Nice try, Mr Wigmore,” Collins replies.
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Hello, and welcome to the Guardian’s live blog of today’s digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee hearing. What once began as an inquiry into fake news seems to have metamorphosed into the main investigative body the country has for asking tough questions about digital electioneering.
Being grilled by Damian Collins and colleagues today are Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore, erstwhile of Leave.EU.
What was already promising to be a contentious hearing, prompted by the swirling rumours and allegations around Leave.EU’s involvement in the Cambridge Analytica affair and Banks’s contentious public style, was pushed into overdrive on Sunday, when the Observer broke the news that Banks had met Russian officials to discuss business leads in the run-up to the Brexit referendum.
It’s been a long road to even get Banks to testify. After initially forcing his way into the inquiry through publicly tweeting accusations that Cambridge Analytica’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, had lied to parliament, Banks then withdrew the allegations in written testimony rather than defend them before the committee.
They requested his presence anyway, which he agreed to, alongside his former deputy Wigmore, but that agreement was withdrawn on Friday, when Banks issued a statement arguing that “the actions of the committee amount to collusion with a pro-EU campaign group in order to create ‘fake news’”. Then the Observer’s story broke, and by Monday, the hearing was back on.
Expect proceedings to begin at 10.30am.
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