Nevertheless, his story was a fabrication. He will certainly have been briefed by powerful people who worked inside Downing Street. Though he correctly wouldn’t comment on his sources when I approached him, I am sure he didn’t invent his “senior No 10 source”. Glen Owen, the political editor behind the Mail on Sunday banner headline, is a senior and respected journalist. With the prime minister’s evident encouragement these Downing Street or government sources have been spreading lies, misrepresentations, smears and falsehoods around Fleet Street and across the major TV channels. Dodgy stories and commentary linked to Downing Street or government sources started to appear in the press and media after Johnson installed his own media team, which was largely drawn from the Vote Leave campaign that won the 2016 Brexit referendum. There’s been a lot of this sort of thing over the past two months. Of course this bogus story fitted like a glove with the dominant Downing Street narrative that the Benn Act – which ruled out a No Deal Brexit – was actually a ‘surrender act’ designed to thwart Brexit altogether. When the prime minister was asked about our story on the BBC ‘Today’ programme on 1 October he responded that there were ‘legitimate questions to be asked about the generation of this legislation’.” Two separate sources in Downing Street told us that officials in Number 10 were gathering evidence about allegations of foreign collusion by MPs opposed to a No Deal Brexit. All rights reserved.Ī Mail on Sunday spokesperson yesterday told openDemocracy: “We stand firmly by our story. As far as the newspaper’s readers are concerned, the story remains true and the senior British politicians behind the Benn Act continue to be investigated for suspicious involvement with foreign powers. There has, however, been no retraction from The Mail on Sunday. In other words, the Mail on Sunday splash that Downing Street was investigating Grieve, Letwin and Benn was fabrication. Yesterday a Cabinet Office spokesperson told openDemocracy: "There was never such an investigation." He told me categorically: “No investigation.” I then rang the Downing Street press office, and asked an official whether there was an investigation as stated in The Mail on Sunday. ![]() Nor, he said, had he been contacted by Downing Street or anyone else about any investigation. He added that he was “not in receipt of any sources of foreign funding”. He told me he had not sought the help of any foreign government “in drafting and tabling a British statute”. Johnson gave credibility to the story when he declared there were “legitimate questions” to be asked of the MPs.īut Robinson didn’t ask the obvious question. On the BBC’s ‘Today’ programme the following Tuesday, presenter Nick Robinson asked Prime Minister Boris Johnson about the investigation.
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