Getty Images / Christopher Furlong / Staff

Marcus J Ball spent the first few days after the Brexit referendum fuming about what had just happened. Ball, then 26, had wound down his startup a couple of weeks earlier, and he was living with his family in Norwich; he had a lot of free time to be “depressed, angry and confused” about the result of the vote, and read all he could find about it.

What Ball found most galling was how the campaign had been dominated by what he believed were mendacious, hateful, and borderline fraudulent statements. And, he thought, the people behind those claims were getting away with it. It wasn’t even the first time that politicians making what Ball felt were inaccurate claims or empty promises had let people down: he thought about the Iraq war, tuition fees, and countless other political whoppers.


“I was just like, 'Fuck this. This has to stop’,” Ball says. “This is a primitive problem, which has been around for thousands of years. It's not impossible to stop it.”

But how? Ball decided to take politicians to court. He wanted to prosecute them. Now, court cases are expensive, and Ball was no lawyer – he was a budding startup founder with a passion for education, and some experience in developing web and mobile software. But Ball was tech-savvy enough to set up a Crowdfunder page. His crowdfunding campaign – christened #BrexitJustice – went live just over a week after the referendum, on July 1, 2016. The goal was to raise at least £100,000 to hire a legal team and start working towards a day in court

Read next Cummings doesn’t need a no deal Brexit to create his British Google Cummings doesn’t need a no deal Brexit to create his British Google

In the end-of-days atmosphere that characterised the post-referendum period, Ball’s crowdfunder was bound to be effective. It was well-designed and smartly publicised on social media by Ball and a few volunteers who were helping him. Ball himself was a companionable figure – athletically built, with a winsome smile and floppy auburn hair – and he quickly notched up a few media appearances.

But most importantly, the #BrexitJustice campaign was extremely comprehensive in denunciating the ills many in the country – but especially furious Remainers – thought had plagued the referendum campaign. It was cathartic. Ball’s plan was to prosecute politicians – the crowdfunder name-checked various pro-Brexit figures – for alleged offences including incitement of racial hatred, fraud, undue influence, and misconduct in public office.


Ball also proposed going to court to ensure that Brexit-triggering Article 50 could not be activated without an act of parliament. And he floated a judicial review of the referendum. Predictably, thousands of donors swarmed the page in a Futurama-like “take my money” craze.

Already during the crowdfunding phase, however, Ball started narrowing his focus. Gina Miller, a businesswoman and anti-Brexit campaigner, had hired the law firm Mishcon de Reya to make sure that parliament would be involved in triggering Brexit – making Ball’s effort on that front unnecessary. And an online article Ball chanced upon some weeks after launching his campaign persuaded him that what he had to target wasn’t Brexit itself, but the political claims that, in his opinion, had made Brexit possible.

The author of the article, a barrister called Anthony Eskander, theorised that several figures in Vote Leave – the official pro-Brexit campaign – might have committed misconduct in public office. According to the Law Commission, such an offence arises when a public officer “wilfully neglects to perform his or her duty and/or wilfully misconducts him or herself; to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public's trust in the office holder; without reasonable excuse or justification.”

Read next Brexit plus coronavirus could spell disaster for Britain's universities Brexit plus coronavirus could spell disaster for Britain's universities

Eskander singled out two of Vote Leave’s talking points – the (potentially misleading) claim that the UK sends £350 million to the EU each week, and the claim that Turkey was about to join the EU – and hypothesised that they were tantamount to deliberately hoodwinking the public.


“It is arguable that Vote Leave had a duty not to knowingly mislead the public that they were targeting,” Eskander wrote. “It is equally arguable that there was a wilful abuse of the public’s trust by knowingly misleading them.” That breach of trust, Eskander theorised, could lead to prosecution for misconduct in public office.

Ball was intrigued, and phoned Eskander. “I can't remember what he said word for word, but the general message was that what I was trying to do was possible: this could potentially be done. And abuse of trust was the real thing.” He added a link to Eskander’s article to his crowdfunding page. Weeks later, the campaign concluded. In less than a month, #BrexitJustice had received pledges and donations for over £145,000.

Getty Images / Leon Neal / Staff

Ball’s initial idea of a private prosecution was that he would essentially be a poster boy – swanning around from public appearance to media interview while his legal team worked the minutiae of the case. He immediately discovered he was wrong.

Read next The weird psychological effect of a no-deal Brexit deadline The weird psychological effect of a no-deal Brexit deadline

First, finding a lawyer willing to potentially take some of the country’s leading politicians to court was not as easy as Ball had expected. Some firms outright refused to meet him; others, who initially seemed interested, dropped out at the last minute. Following four weeks of scouting, and a move from Norwich to London, Ball finally found his lawyers: Edmonds Marshall McMahon (EMM), a London-based firm specialised in private prosecution cases.

When revealing his hiring, in late September 2016, Ball made a pivot from the anti-Brexit side of the argument to pro-truth ecumenism, announcing that he had instructed EMM to work on the possible prosecution of figures both on the Leave and the Remain side. (That would cost him one Remain supporter, who asked to get back his £100 donation.)

But hiring EMM was not the end of it. “I discovered that working with lawyers is immensely expensive. And unless you have hundreds of thousands of pounds to spend on this thing, you're not going to be able to get a lawyer or a team of lawyers to work full time on your case,” Ball says. “Long story short: I spent a long time doing the case myself.”

Ball started spending day after day doing research at the British Library, or in the offices of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) – the body in charge of monitoring and paying MPs’ salaries and expenses. He also asked Sky News, the broadcaster, to allow him to scour their video archive, and they obliged letting him use a computer with full access to past programmes and raw footage. “I went through all of it. And I found a treasure trove,” Ball says.

The research was complex, in-depth, and covering a smorgasbord of different legal issues. But, boiling it down, two points were essential to Ball’s case: establishing whether the politicians who had campaigned during the referendum could be considered to be “perform[ing] his or her duty” as MPs; and ascertaining that the alleged misconduct – that is: the alleged lying – had happened “wilfully”.

Read next The UK says it loves immigrants. Will immigrants believe it? The UK says it loves immigrants. Will immigrants believe it?

Ball thought that the first point was dealt in a statement issued by the IPSA, in which the body said that MPs had been able to expense for their campaigning activities during the referendum, on the basis that the vote was “a cross-party matter of great importance to the future of the United Kingdom.”

“What they were saying was that the EU referendum campaign was not just about politics, it was a matter of national interests,” Ball says. “And if IPSA says that politicians can charge expenses for campaigning, it means that [campaigning] is an MP’s duty.”

The “intentional lying” piece of the puzzle was harder to understand. One way Ball and his team thought would help them argue that one or more politicians had wilfully misled the public was checking whether they had given multiple different versions of the same claim within a short period of time. If you constantly alter your claim, it is tough to make the suggestion that you thought you were right every time.

Now, was there any campaigner, on either side of the Brexit referendum, who had repeatedly made different claims about a verifiable figure, in a string of press or broadcast appearances?

Boris Johnson was always going to be an easy target. As a frontman of the Vote Leave campaign, he had given speeches at countless rallies and events. His interviews and videoed appearances were all over the place in Sky’s archive. He had written his Daily Telegraph columns. He had repeatedly appeared next to a red bus featuring the £350m-a-week figure. Virtually no other politician, either on the Leave or the Remain side, had been in the public spotlight as much, and left so much material for Ball to argue his case.

Read next How the Cummings myth crumbled How the Cummings myth crumbled

Ball and his team found that Johnson – at the time of the Brexit referendum campaign both an MP for Uxbridge and the Mayor of London – had repeatedly uttered the £350m figure. But on some occasions, he had replaced it with different figures: in a Telegraph op-ed, for instance, Johnson had talked of saving “£8bn a year” – equal to £153m a week; in a Newcastle rally, according to #BrexitJustice, he claimed that leaving the EU would allow the country to save £20bn a year, equating to £384m a week .

For Ball, the £350m claim is ideal to build a misconduct in public office case. Many wild claims might have been made during the referendum, about immigration, lightbulbs, law and bananas. But this, Ball says, is about public finances.

“If you're an elected representative, one of the biggest parts of your job is to scrutinise, understand, examine public spending figures, public finances,” Ball says. “And if you've got a politician lying, about that, they're doing the opposite of what we need them to do.”

“If they're coming back to the public, and they're saying things, which they know are not true about all of those matters, especially financial, they are abusing public trust.”

In early September 2018, Ball uploaded a video to YouTube, titled “Boris Johnson – I want to prosecute you”. Over two years had gone by since he had created the #BrexitJustice crowdfunder, and things had changed radically. There had been another crowdfund, in which he had asked his backers to pay him a salary to work full-time on the case; he had received £29,696 (which, detracted Crowdfunder fees and VAT, shrunk to about £24,000).

Read next Brexit negotiations aren’t ready for the coronavirus pandemic Brexit negotiations aren’t ready for the coronavirus pandemic

Going through his expense report provides a window on how Ball’s life was unfolding: expenses covering law books and payments to video-makers for the production of promotional material appear side by side with purchases of self-defence courses, as Ball grows preoccupied with his safety.

Someone told him to “go kill himself”, while an ominous message informed him that he “was being watched.” At some point in mid-2018, Ball severed relationship with EMM, and hired another law firm, Bankside Commercial Solicitors, and barristers from Church Court Chambers, including Anthony Eskander; Ball had to launch a third crowdfund to keep the case going, but he says he relied on credit cards and bank overdraft for personal expenses. The case had completely taken over his life. He often complained that he missed spending more time interacting with people.

In the “I want to prosecute you” video, a jubilant Ball looks smirking into the camera as if Boris Johnson were on the other side. All the research was ready – documents created by Ball personally amounted to over 220,000 words – and soon his legal team would be ready to lay the information before the Magistrates’ Court.

“Hello Boris Johnson, I am Marcus J. Ball: I am a private prosecutor, and I have a problem with lying politicians,” Ball says in the video. He proceeds to say how he and his team think that Johnson “repeatedly, knowingly and deceitfully made incorrect claims to the British public concerning how our money is spent”, and how that could be an offence with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

He suggests that the Ball v Johnson case, if it happens and is decided in Ball’s favour, could end up establishing a new precedent in Common Law, making it illegal for politicians to lie – in the UK and around the world. “You could be a part of that, Boris,” he says.

Read next What happens if coronavirus forces us to close parliament? What happens if coronavirus forces us to close parliament?

As his smile transitions to a snarl, Ball says, “if the people are willing to fund me, I am going to prosecute you. What do you think Boris? Will they?”

Reactions to the video were mixed when it was posted on Twitter. Some people liked it, but others found the gloating tone in bad taste. “This is a serious matter and you come across as an arrogant and flippant self-publicist,” one person claiming to be a supporter of Ball’s wrote on the social network.

“I was happy [in that video], because I'd been working my ass off for ages and we could finally do it,” Ball says. But he took down the video shortly after posting it. (A copy of it has been re-uploaded to YouTube by another account). Ball has also changed how he speaks about the case. On the “life imprisonment” reference, he now says: “It is not what we want: this isn't about some revenge thing to get [Johnson] thrown in prison forever."

"This is not even about him, about Boris Johnson. This is about creating a precedent against lying in politics," he explains.

In a way, the video incident reveals a fundamental tension at the core of Ball’s battle. At the very beginning, in 2016, he had approached the matter with an internet activist’s mindset: strengthened by his experience in developing mobile applications – including a political Tamagotchi app – and giving convincing elevator pitches, he had turbocharged a quasi-viral crowdfunding campaign, and caught the eye of every major media outlet from LBC to the Deutsche Welle. He even started working on a #BrexitJustice app.

Read next How chlorinated chicken ate Brexit How chlorinated chicken ate Brexit

Now that Ball v Johnson is becoming a much more concrete eventuality, and a much more concretely legal matter, Ball needs to be careful with what he says, or he could compromise the case’s integrity.

In his frequent Instagram videos – which he shoots in the bedroom of a flat he rents in West London, a “When Politicians lie Democracy dies” sign often visible in the background – Ball constantly reminds his viewers that Johnson is innocent until proven guilty. He emphasises that this case is not about reversing Brexit, and that he would happily prosecute Remain figures if a case against them could be reliably built. He peppers his social media posts with awkward hashtags like #respectthecourtprocess and #onlythecourtscandecide. Then again, the sum Ball has raised so far – over £430,000 since 2016 – is unlikely to be enough to cover the expenses that an extended trial and potential appeals would require. A fourth crowdfunding campaign is underway, but more stunts and videos might well be needed.

Getty Images / Ian Forsyth / Stringer

Is this a real thing? At the very beginning, Ball used to say that, yes, this was a real thing, but that it would be “very difficult” for the campaign to actually be successful. Now, he keeps saying that the case is solid, but that no similar case has ever been done before.

The offence of misconduct in public office is so poorly defined that the Law Commission is in the midst of reviewing it. “[I]t is not clear what mischief the current offence targets and therefore what form the offence should take,” the Commission writes on its website.

Read next Brexit Britain should rewrite the global tech regulation rulebook Brexit Britain should rewrite the global tech regulation rulebook

One of the most recent cases in the UK involving this offence is R v Wallis, a trial linked to the so-called “Plebgate”. In 2014, policeman Keith Wallis was sentenced to 12 months in prison for giving a false account of a quarrel between one of his colleagues and Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell. Doing so, the verdict reads “was a betrayal of [the] standards [expected of a police officer], and was misconduct [that] has had a significant impact on public trust and confidence in the integrity of police officers.”

Other, recent high-profile cases occurred in Australia, where two former ministers were convicted for “wilful misconduct in public office” in separate cases, and convicted to serve prison time. Both cases involved the defendants trying to acquire some sort of financial benefits through the abuse of their offices – not simply making incorrect claims on a campaign trail.

“[This against Boris Johnson] is a purely fanciful prosecution if you ask me to be honest,” says Jeremy Horder, a professor of Criminal Law at the LSE and the author of a book on criminal misconduct in office.

“I think the courts are not going to get involved. There are instances where you can get into trouble with the criminal law if, for example, in the course of an election campaign, if you say false things about your election opponent. But in that case there is specific legislation that says that if you get yourself elected by corrupt or false claims, then the election can be unraveled. This is an utterly different situation.”

“I think, in this case, in the kind of rough and tumble of elections and referendums – it just doesn't seem to me that this is really going anywhere,” Horder says. “And I think that [if the case went ahead], if you weren't allowed to make exaggerated claims, it would have a kind of chilling effect on free speech.”

Read next The UK’s points-based immigration system will scare off tech founders The UK’s points-based immigration system will scare off tech founders

The case is unique and untested. And it opens many questions about the role of truth and exaggeration in campaigning and politics, and on the role courts should play in what is an eminently political process.

Ball, though, remains optimistic. In late February, Ball’s legal team filed an application for a summons before Westminster’s Magistrate Court. On the day, he posted a video to Instagram, where he gave a statement before the court’s entrance, and several pictures of him clutching red-bound court documents.

Since then, he has been trying to recruit Lords and MPs to testify at a possible trial, “as they have an understanding of the need for the public to build trust in parliamentarians.” Ball says that some people have accepted, but many have turned his request down. Jeremy Corbyn, the Leader of the Opposition, politely declined, saying that events in parliament demanded his full attention. Campaigner Gina Miller has corresponded with Ball, but hasn’t come out in favour of his case or against. A spokesperson for Miller says that she “doesn’t feel she has read into this case enough to comment on it.”

On May 14, Ball’s team and Boris Johnson’s lawyers, BCL Solicitors LLP, appeared for a private hearing before district judge Margot Coleman, in Westminster magistrates court. (BCL Solicitors LLP did not respond to multiple requests for comments, nor did Boris Johnson.) Coleman noted: ‘This is a private hearing. Nobody has been arrested, nobody has been charged, nobody has been interviewed.” Johnson has not commented on the case and neither has his legal team. He has, however, repeatedly stood by his £350m figure, which he said represented the UK’s weekly gross contribution to EU budgets. In January, he argued the gross figure would reach £438m by the end of the post-Brexit transition period.

Following the hearing, Bankside’s solicitor Giles Bright released a statement: “the court has determined that a public hearing will take place on Thursday 23 May 2019 at Westminster Magistrates Court, when the Judge will consider an application to issue a summons against the proposed defendant, Mr Boris Johnson MP, for the offence of misconduct in public office.”

Read next Brexit Britain’s freeport utopia isn't about free trade, or ports Brexit Britain’s freeport utopia isn't about free trade, or ports

“We wish to stress again that Mr Johnson has not been charged with any criminal offence and is at all times presumed innocent until proven otherwise,” Bright said.

On May 23, after a two-hour long public hearing, judge Coleman announced that she would deliver her decision on the summons application on May 29, in writing. “If they grant a summons, I can be the person who serves Johnson the papers,” Ball says. “I think I'd rather do it in parliament, rather than going to his house, unless we absolutely have to. Going to his house would be a bit too personal.”

In her subsequent decision, Coleman ruled a summons for Johnson to attend court would be issued. "The allegations which have been made are unproven accusations and I do not make any findings of fact," she wrote. However she believes the legal claim is a "proper case" and said Johnson should attend Westminster Magistrates Court for a preliminary hearing, before the proceedings are sent to crown court for a trial.

Updated May 29, 2019 11.50GMT: This article has been amended to include details of the summons issued. It was previously clarified, on May 23, that Ball has launched a fourth crowdfunding campaign, and the amount of money he has raised has increased, including changed figures about his "salary" crowdfund.

More great stories from WIRED

🐉 Game of Thrones violated a fundamental rule of storytelling

👍 Follow these essential tips to using Trello like a boss

🚀 Jeff Bezos wants to colonise space, but he's destroying Earth

💰 Here's what Facebook, Google and Tesla pay staff in 2019


👽 The best science fiction books everyone should read

📧 Never miss an awesome story again with our weekly WIRED Weekender newsletter