In the summer of 2015, Darren Grimes was a Liberal Democrat activist from County Durham when he gave an interview to the BBC paying tribute to the party’s former leader Charles Kennedy.

“He believed that in an increasingly globalised world, having Britain in Europe was the only way forward,” said the young campaigner.

But within six months, Grimes was involved in running pro-Brexit campaigns. According to the Electoral Commission, he would soon be used by Vote Leave to channel hundreds of thousands of pounds into targeted Facebook ads – a change in direction which has today left him facing a £20,000 fine and a potential police investigation.

The transformation of a young man – who at the time of the referendum was a 22-year-old fashion student at university in Brighton and part-time shop worker – into the face of Vote Leave’s abuse of electoral law is a strange story of someone sucked into the high-stakes world of Westminster politics. It’s also a tale of incompetent record-keeping and steak dinners on expenses.

Grimes, who has talked about being raised in a single parent family, first made public appearances during the 2015 general election when he recorded a video for the BBC bemoaning the lack of opportunities for working-class Britons due to the dominance of unpaid internships.

“I don’t have that luxury of being able to progress up the social ladder, even though I’m a hard-worker, I’m determined,” he said.

Soon after, he became involved in Norman Lamb’s failed attempt to win the Lib Dem leadership, alongside future Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Mark Gettleson – who would later become central to the global scandal which engulfed Facebook.

As Grimes’s rapid political transformation took hold, it was the EU referendum which finally offered him a real opportunity. He was pushed as the face of a pro-Brexit youth movement and appeared on TV and radio arguing for the UK to go it alone. TV producers, desperate to provide balanced debate, were delighted to find a young, erudite man who could argue for leaving for the EU.

Ostensibly, his appearances were justified because Grimes had founded a youth-focused pro-Brexit campaign called BeLeave, which produced viral videos and graphics to make the case for exiting the EU. In reality, BeLeave was reaching a tiny audience and he had no real funding; it was little more than a label for Grimes’s activities.

The status of BeLeave’s campaign is still not clear. Grimes’s initial expenditure was the sum total of £21.51, during which time he was regularly working out of the Vote Leave offices, an arrangement which both sides insist was an informal offer of help.



“The story was that he was sitting there because he didn’t have other space in London,” one former Vote Leave worker told the Guardian.

Many similar groups with varying relations to Vote Leave were set up during this period. These included Veterans for Britain, which was found to have inaccurately reported a donation but cleared of more serious offences in the same Electoral Commission investigation that resulted in Grimes’s fine.

Grimes, however, was more deeply involved. He was also more incompetent when it came to filling out paperwork.

He appears to have ticked a box to register himself – rather than BeLeave – as a referendum campaigner with the Electoral Commission, changing his legal status and ability to spend money. The commission insists it double-checked this unusual registration with him at the time; Grimes insists he made a mistake on a form. Either way, it contributed to his punishment.

Vote Leave helped Grimes formally register BeLeave as an organisation in May 2016, providing him with the required paperwork.

Then in the final weeks of the campaign, when Vote Leave began to reach its £7m spending limit yet wanted to spend more on Facebook adverts, it set up a process where a Vote Leave official would email Grimes with the offer of a donation to BeLeave.

Grimes would then reply, accepting, but asking the payment to be made directly to AggregateIQ, the Canadian tech firm linked to Cambridge Analytica. The money was only ever transferred on paper.

“The evidence shows that his BeLeave campaign website was set up by Vote Leave, its content was created by Vote Leave, he consulted Vote Leave on campaigning and Vote Leave actively sought funding for his work,” the Electoral Commission concluded. “We are also satisfied that BeLeave’s creation, strategy, funding and activities throughout the time it existed as an unincorporated association in May and June 2016 were all under the significant influence of Vote Leave.”

Grimes appears to have received little personal benefit. The only other major expense incurred by his BeLeave group was £461 on a steak dinner at a Dover branch of the Ramada hotel on the eve of the referendum.

This story is pretty hard to follow but I do like this detail: Darren Grimes' BeLeave spent £675k on online advertising. Its only other major expense was a £461 steak dinner on referendum night. pic.twitter.com/qRN6jBVG5k — Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) March 27, 2018

Since the referendum Grimes, one of the most junior Vote Leave campaigners, has faced two years of media coverage and repeated investigations. He is one of only two people associated with the Vote Leave campaign, along with the former official David Halsall, who is facing a police investigation for campaign overspending. Meanwhile the likes of its campaign chief, Dominic Cummings, who helped direct donors towards Grimes’s campaign, have not been held personally responsible by the Electoral Commission.

Grimes later joined BrexitCentral, a website founded by former Vote Leave staff and associates, before recently accepting a job running social media campaigns for the free-market thinktank the Institute for Economic Affairs.

On Tuesday, Grimes said he was “shocked and disappointed by the Electoral Commission and their behaviour”. He said he had done nothing wrong, called the fine “entirely disproportionate and unjustified” and said he had been persecuted. Vote Leave’s former chief executive, Matthew Elliott, called the report “riddled with errors and completely wrong”.

How Grimes will now pay the £20,000 and legal costs associated with any criminal prosecution is unclear. Either way, the event is likely to define his career.