"This all makes me really uncomfortable. Ben Warner wants us to spend £110k of public money per month with the agency who were behind vote leave who have no mainstream polling experience.”
The government has been strongly criticized by opposition MPs after emails revealed by the Good Law Project suggested it used public funds to pay for polling on Labour Party politicians, including Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer.
The emails, released during a High Court case, show senior officials holding discussions about polling done by private firm Hanbury Strategy, a move that senior civil servants are reported to have felt uncomfortable with.
One of the civil servants wrote in an email in May 2020: “Hanbury measure attitudes towards political figures, which they shouldn’t do using government money, but they’ve been asked to and it’s a battle that I think is hard to fight.”
The revelations come as the Good Law Project launches a legal challenge against the government for awarding contracts to Hanbury Strategy who it says are ‘associates’ of Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings.
In an another email from March 2020, unearthed during the course of the hearing, Cummings is revealed to have told senior civil servants demanding that approval is given ‘immediately’ for Hanbury to carry out its polling work. The email adds that if anyone from the Cabinet Office whines, ‘tell them I ordered it from the PM’.
The emails also show Ben Warner, who previously worked alongside Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign, ‘directing civil servants to his private WhatsApp rather than his official email address’.
It was also revealed that a civil servant was uneasy at Warner’s plans to use taxpayers’ money for polling.
The civil servant wrote: “This all makes me really uncomfortable. Ben Warner wants us to spend £110k of public money per month with the agency who were behind vote leave who have no mainstream polling experience.”
The release of the emails prompted strong criticism from Labour MPs.
Angela Rayner said the revelations had the ‘hallmarks of a racket’.
She said: “Taxpayers’ money that has been abused in this way should be paid back by the Conservative Party. Taxpayers’ money is not the personal cashpoint of Conservative Ministers to dish out to their mates.
“We need a fully independent inquiry into the Government contracts that have been handed out over private email and WhatsApp so we can get to the bottom of this scandal.”
Jonathan Ashworth wrote on Twitter: “If we in govt had used public money to conduct polling on David Cameron and Boris Johnson the Tories would have been rightly outraged. Today Johnson’s abuse of tax payers money is scandalous.
“It really is one rule for them with Johnson and his gang.”
The Cabinet Office said it does not carry out party political polling but that it does carry out polling ‘on the suitability of a variety of spokespeople to deploy important public health messages.’
A spokesperson said: “In response to an unprecedented global pandemic, the government acted with urgency to undertake vital research into public attitudes and behaviours.
“This research shaped crucial public health messages, helping us to protect the NHS and save lives.”
A Hanbury Strategy spokesman said: “Our team has worked on some of the most successful political campaigns of recent years and our knowledge of polling and modelling is widely appreciated as being first class.
“This evidence shows there was some initial scepticism by an official about our work but a few months into working together they described our output as ‘brilliant’ and ‘Exactly the type of thing that I was dreaming of seeing’.
“We were asked by the Government to step up and provide research and significant amounts of modelling at extremely short notice in order to help with a national crisis.
“We agreed to do this in the full knowledge that it would probably lead to politically motivated attacks against us and the risks that this would create for our business. We did it because we thought we could help save lives and it was therefore a risk worth taking. Our work contributed to what was a hugely successful public health communications campaign which undoubtedly prevented many deaths. For that reason, if we had to make the choice again we would still agree to step up and help in this time of crisis.”
Basit Mahmood is co-editor of Left Foot Forward
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