The company owned and funded by Lord Ashcroft which recently published the unauthorised biography of David Cameron, Call Me Dave, has continued to lose money, according to newly-filed accounts.
Biteback Publishing Limited, where the billionaire Conservative donor is the dominant shareholder, and the political commentator Iain Dale has a minor stake, increased its losses by £153,000 for the period ending December 2014.
The political biography, which included an unsubstantiated account of porcine adventures by the Prime Minister, was published just before this year’s Conservative Conference in Manchester.
Best-seller charts scheduled to appear this week, will give the first indication of whether or not Lord Ashcroft’s substantial investment in what has been described as an expensive score-settling project, has paid off.
Although Lord Ashcroft has been a major donor to the Tories, and spent millions on specialist polling that helped target marginal-seat funding, he was not brought into government by Mr Cameron.
Biteback’s accounts were filed electronically at the end of last month and appeared quickly on the government’s register of company information.
Lord Ashcroft’s information holding company, Political Holdings Ltd (PHL) which includes the influential Conservative Home website, Biteback and other parliamentary intelligence businesses, did not file its figures electronically this year.
PHL hand-delivered its accounts to Companies House at the end of last month. They are expected to appear within the next few days.
Although the register officially describes the account filing as “overdue”, Mr Dale said there had been no mistake or reason to be embarrassed because they had been “delivered on time”.
