More intriguing than a John le Carré thriller, the shadowy story behind Brexit is a tailor-made blockbuster involving eccentric billionaires, far-right cabals, spies, spivs, technological skulduggery and a host of unscrupulous politicians supported by an unwitting cast of millions of UK citizens.

The Westminster Lair

Central to the story, an opulent area of Westminster; the lair of a plethora of right-wing, far-right and lunatic fringe climate change deniers, which are centred on 55 and 57 Tufton Street.

Owned by businessman Richard Smith, 55 Tufton Street has stealthily played a significant role in what could be the defining moment in 21st century UK political history. It’s now the visible tip of an enormous neocon iceberg whose raison d’être is to deliver a mechanism for radical change of a magnitude that will massively impact the lives of a still largely oblivious UK population.

Within the walls of these innocuous Westminster town houses, a well-funded collection of closely connected groups have been diligently astroturfing, lobbying, coercing, plotting and scheming with politicians and media platforms for years with the aim of delivering a Brexit that would be consistent with the ideology of their foreign paymasters.

The Nine Entities

55 Tufton St, we learn from Shahmir Sanni, the whistleblower who was involved with Vote Leave, who was also a tenant before moving to nearby Westminster Tower, then BeLeave and the Tax Payers’ Alliance, against whom he has brought a claim for unfair dismissal, is where what he describes as ‘The Nine Entities’ meet. These entities are:

The Adam Smith Institute (Great Smith St)

Brexit Central (55)

The Centre for Policy Studies (57)

Civitas (55)

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (55)

The Institute for Economic Affairs (Lord North St)

Leave means Leave (55)

The Office of Peter Whittle (The New Culture Forum) (55)

The Tax Payers’ Alliance (55)

Shahmir recounts how these ‘Nine Entities’ took part in biweekly meetings chaired by ex BBC and Telegraph journalist, Jonathan Isaby, who having worked at the ‘Tax Payers’ Alliance’ since 2011, when he was appointed their political director, became their chief executive in 2014, and then ‘moved’ to Brexit Central to become their editor; a common enough scenario amongst the ‘Nine Entities’ apparently, who Shahmir alleges operate a ‘revolving door’ policy of employment between each other.

Shahmir explains:

“Meetings take place at 55 Tufton Street every other Tuesday (“The Tuesday Meetings”). Attendance at the Tuesday Meetings varies, but is usually attended by all or substantially all of the Nine Entities. The Respondent and its staff lead the Tuesday Meetings, which are typically chaired by Mr Isaby. The purpose of the Tuesday Meetings is to agree a common line on political topics in the news between the Nine Entities, and to co-ordinate the public messaging that the individual organisations can then issue on that topic.”

The Thin Veil Slips

During the referendum, Vote Leave was at pains to distance itself from the Arron Banks funded Leave.EU and particularly their frontman, Nigel Farage.

Vote Leave’s rationale was that Leave.EU and Farage had a reputation for trading in the gutter, a gutter overflowing with society’s racist element, a reputation that could have easily discouraged their own supporters from voting to leave the EU.

Despite this reservation, Vote Leave weren’t adverse to using the votes Farage brought with him to get the Leave campaign over the line; just 635,000 votes swung the election in Leave’s favour.

But today, that thin veil of contentious respectability has slipped. Faced with a resurgent Remain movement, as the Brexit turkeys come home to roost, Leave means Leave has found a home at 55 Tufton St.

Co-founded by Richard Tice, an active member of the Leave.EU hierarchy, Leave means Leave has now welcomed Nigel Farage who’s using it as a platform for his ‘return to frontline politics’.

As seen below, Leave means Leave is almost a reincarnation of Conservatives for Britain, little more than a collection of impotent right-wing backbenchers and ERG members who excel in little more than populist rhetoric and dog-whistle politics.

Leave means Leave’s chosen home is a significant development in that, for the first time, it brings two of the main characters of the separate strands of the Leave campaign into proximity at 55 Tufton St, Matthew Elliott and Nigel Farage.

High profile, charismatic, media savvy Farage has always been there to distract the electorate away from the true objectives of Brexit.

From UKIP, through to Leave.EU and now Leave means Leave, the same simple yet effective messaging of taking back control of borders, sovereignty and trade policy from unelected EU bureaucrats is the false populist rhetoric designed to maximise media attention and mislead their target; the low-information voter, so essential to the delivery of the EU referendum, who is fed-up with what’s on offer from our two main parties.

By comparison, the adenoidal Elliott maintains a much lower profile. A far less charismatic individual, he appears clumsy, awkward and easily challengeable during combative media appearances.

However, where Elliott excels is in his tenacious approach and being politically attuned to like-minded individuals from the international far-right. He’s made the UK’s secession from the EU his life’s work, as can be seen in this quote from a letter he sent to Vote Leave coordinator and now adviser to Leavers for London, (before mysteriously disappearing from their website), Alexander Shayler:

Dear Alexander, We did it! It was the biggest decision of our lifetimes; many of us have been waiting for this chance for decades; the country did the right thing, and Voted Leave.

A graduate of the London School of Economics, Elliott is a founding member of many of the groups at Tufton St who have engineered the real Brexit; not the Leave campaign fantasy wrapped in a union flag but the real far-right ideology designed to deliver a low-tax, small state, deregulated economy that will have a detrimental affect on the lives of the very UK citizens they coerced into believing they were voting Leave for reasons other than to negatively impact the NHS, public services, schools and the day-to-day lives of the vast majority of the people of the UK.

The LSE describes its BSc Government degree as “Politics is about power, conflict and ideas. The study of politics involves analysis of the ways in which individuals and groups define and interpret political issues and seek to shape government decisions.” Elliott took to this like a duck to water and, since graduating with a First in this subject, he’s attempted to practice exactly what he was preached.

Setting up groups as vehicles designed to shape government decisions was a strategy enthusiastically embraced by Elliott. It was also a strategy used to promote an agenda set by people from another country.

Beginning with the Tax payers’ Alliance, as a co-founder with Andrew Allum, Elliott went on to become a founding member of Business for Britain (the prototype for Vote Leave), Big Brother Watch and, alongside Dominic Cummings, Vote Leave.

Whilst at Vote Leave Elliott was involved in the registration of a host of grassroots organisations that appeared to be simply a delivery method for Vote Leave’s astroturfing tactics. Prior to the referendum, over twenty groups, all using the ‘for Britain’ title, were registered, including Muslims for Britain, Veterans for Britain and Women for Britain.

Post-referendum, Elliott went on to set-up BrexitCentral, manned predominantly by personnel from Elliott’s stable, such as former fashion student, Darren Grimes who was magically transformed into their deputy editor behind Jonathan Isaby. BrexitCentral surprisingly secured unfettered access to Parliament by obtaining a journalistic pass allowing them to gain access to prime minister’s briefings and the lobby; much to the chagrin of traditional journalists attempting to report the facts rather than attempting to deliver little more than an agenda.

Elliott’s Brexit strategy wasn’t simply deployed during the months prior to the referendum. Following the 2015 general election, Elliott was involved in setting up Conservatives for Britain, a group of MPs that included the usual suspects such as Steve Baker, David Campbell Bannerman MEP, Bernard Jenkin, Bill Cash, John Redwood, Owen Paterson, James Cleverly and Tom Pursglove; a vehicle for backbenchers who organised a rebellion in the Commons to ensure purdah was reinstated into the Referendum Bill. You can watch Elliott explain here how an organisation not yet formed, set-up ‘Conservatives for Britain’.

Elliott explained that this small victory “was absolutely vital for a fair and balanced campaign” which, in hindsight, was an astonishing claim now that the full facts surrounding Vote Leave’s campaign strategy and tactics are a matter of record.

The evidence was there for all to see a long time before the referendum. The Electoral commission knew of Steve Baker’s plan to set-up organisations to circumvent the spending restrictions; they were also aware that in November 2015, Vote Leave set-up a fake company so that two students could heckle David Cameron at the CBI conference.

The stunt was widely described as “grubby” and former minister Eric Pickles called for Vote Leave to be denied the lead status for the then forthcoming referendum, but campaign Dominic Cummings responded, “You think it’s nasty? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

We now know that Elliot and Cummings’ Vote Leave carried on lying, cheating and breaking the law with impunity; friends in high places indeed.

Elliott had also played a significant role in the ill-fated ‘Conservative Friends of Russia’, an organisation whose Tory MP membership later resembled rats deserting a sinking ship when the groups motives were brought into question following the discovery that their head contact at the Russian Embassy, Sergey Nalobin, was a spy who was later expelled from Britain.

Echoing the later cultivation of Leave.EU’s Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore by the Russians, the group was thought to be little more than an FSB influence operation, causing the organisation to later reinvent itself as ‘The Westminster Russia Forum’.

Away from the think tank world, the ever busy Elliott was also a partner in ‘Awareness Analytics Partners’, known as A2P, this company specialises in areas similar to Cambridge Analytica. A2P is funded by the ultra conservative, creationist DeVos family and the Koch brothers, people who are synonymous with right-wing organisations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. You can read Wendy Siegelman’s excellent investigation into Elliott’s involvement in A2P here.

Most intriguing of all, Elliott has had substantial involvement with two heavyweight organisations, the Atlas Network and the Legatum Institute.

Elliott and The Legatum Institute

Since January 2017 Elliott had been a senior fellow of the secretive and publicity shy Legatum Institute; a senior fellow until they decided to distance themselves from him, along with fellow poputchik, their Director of Economic policy, Shanker Singham.

Bad publicity for Legatum, concerning Elliott and Singham’s high-profile involvement in shaping the government’s Brexit policy, came to a head when MP Liam Byrne, using parliamentary priviledge, suggested that Legatum was being financed through money ultimately derived from Russia. Legatum, since the arrival of Elliott and Singham, had forged close links with Michael Gove and Boris Johnson and were constantly in the news as their frequent policy meetings with the government were widely reported.

This attention was far too much for New Zealander Christopher Chandler, the Dubai based businessman and founding partner of the Legatum Group who in turn had pumped millions into the London based Legatum Institute. Elliott and Singham both left in March 2018 with Singham subsequently finding employment at ‘nine entities member’ the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Now at the IEA, Singham simply carried on where he had left off with Legatum, as can be seen here in this Newsnight video:

This parting of the ways in March hasn’t stemmed the interest in Chandler. Nor has it prevented the fallout from an investigation into Legatum which was clearly the result of the activities of Elliott and Singham.

In the House of Commons in May 2018, Conservative MP Bob Seely, backed by Ben Bradshaw, Liam Byrne and Chris Bryant, stated that French Intelligence had suspected Chandler of working for Russian intelligence since 2002.

In June 2018 The Charity Commission found that a report Legatum had published on free trade deals after Britain left the EU, was “not consistent with the charity’s objects to advance education and could be seen to be promoting a particular political view”.

This is not the first time concerns of this type over groups with whom Elliott was involved have been brought to the attention of the Charity Commission. A 2011 inquiry into another group established by Elliott in 2006, The Politics and Economics Research Trust (PERT), resulted in a warning from the Commission to ‘manage’ its association with another of Elliott’s organisations, The TaxPayers’ Alliance.

PERT is little more than a charitable extension of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, the closeness of all of these organisations is demonstrated when you discover the owner of 55 Tufton St, Richard Smith, is a trustee of PERT.

Elliott stepped down from PERT in 2010, yet since that time, most of their >£2m grants have ended up in Elliott’s organisations, including £50,000 to Business for Britain which was used in the production of the 1,000 page document Change or Go, an anti-EU report that was extensively used by the right-wing press to further their cause.

The investigation by the Charity Commission in 2016, into concerns that PERT had been funding political activity, reported in February 2017 that the trustees of PERT could not be certain that their grants were not being used to further their educational objectives.

Only once the Charity Commission inquiry was underway did the PERT trustees suddenly review their grant to Business for Britain and ask for its return, due to their ‘discovery’ that the project had “materially altered in the course of its execution.”

Business for Britain repaid the amount in full before the referendum, but the damage was done.

The misleading information within the report was widely promoted as truth by right-wing media outlets, then disseminated through social media. Typical of these spurious claims were those that ‘proved’ that over 60% of UK law originates from the EU, a classic example of Elliott’s strategy of conflating information with a view to misleading the low-information voter. The real truth about the relationship between UK and EU law can be seen here on a University of Cambridge website page.

Elliott and The Atlas Network

The Atlas Network was founded in 1981 by an Englishman living in San Francisco. Old Etonian Antony Fisher was a pioneer of factory farming in the UK and is the same person who had earlier founded the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in 1955.

The idea behind The Atlas Network was to replicate the IEA on an international scale through training, coaching and funding new think tanks that were essentially clones of the IEA. People like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Margaret Thatcher applauded the idea of replicating the IEA model far and wide.

After Fisher’s death in 1988, UK politician Oliver Letwin said, “Without Antony Fisher, no IEA; without the IEA and its clones, no Thatcher and quite possibly no Reagan; without Reagan, no Star Wars; without Star Wars, no economic collapse of the Soviet Union. Quite a chain of consequences for a chicken farmer!”

With Fisher being a staunch proponent of factory farming, it’s no surprise that the IEA are keen advocates of deregulated intensive agribusiness, where profit is placed before the environment, people and animal welfare; all areas where the EU really do make a difference but these issues resonate little with those voters believing that Brexit was about taking back control of borders, sovereignty and trade policy from unelected EU bureaucrats.

Many in the UK be shocked to find that EU bureaucrats will be replaced by American executives in the tobacco industry, the (cane) sugar industry, the agrochemical industry, animal husbandry and of course the fossil fuel industry via policies that, just as with the Brexit referendum, were discussed in secret outside of parliament and cabinet.

Control was certainly taken back, all the way back to the neocon paymasters who’ve funded the greatest scam in British political history and they’re nowhere near finished yet.

Perhaps the most disturbing goal of the IEA is their belief that the NHS should be replaced by an insurance based private healthcare scheme with local health boards turned into competing national franchises.

Replication of the IEA type think tanks is the goal of the Atlas Network and it will come of no surprise that Matthew Elliott is involved with Atlas as a trainer, a speaker and through groups which are ‘global partners’.

In November 2017 Elliott conducted a Atlas Network webinar for people who will be replicating groups with identical views to the IEA, students involved in the Atlas Leadership Academy (ALA).

Elliott was introduced as a policy entrepreneur who has founded and run numerous award-winning campaigns, starting with the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA), where he won Atlas Network’s $100,000 Templeton Freedom Award for ‘The Single Income Tax.’

At Business for Britain (BfB), the precursor to Vote Leave, he oversaw the publication of ‘Change, or Go: How Britain would gain influence and prosper outside an unreformed EU’, which became a key resource for Brexit ideologues.

Echoing his LSE schooling, Elliott explained to the students “that behind the scenes, teams engage audiences, navigate policy discussions, work with the press, and debate difficult topics. The most adept ultimately change opinions and win.”

Of the Nine Entities involved in regular meetings held at 55 Tufton St designed to “agree a common line on political topics in the news between the Nine Entities, and to co-ordinate the public messaging that the individual organisations can then issue on that topic’ six of the group,The Adam Smith Institute, Big Brother Watch, Civitas, Institute of Economic Affairs, Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Centre for Policy Studies are all Global Partners of the Atlas Network along with their extremely close associates, the Centre for Education Economics, the Cobden Centre, Conservatives for Liberty, the Geneva Network, IFT Ltd, the Legatum Institute, the Network for a Free Society, Open Europe and the Freedom Association.

These organisations, all members of the Atlas Network, are littered with the politicians driving a ‘Brexit at any Cost’ agenda with talk of sovereignty, self-determination and freedom masking their real agenda of achieving a low-tax, small state, deregulated economy.

When it comes to attempting to understand who is funding these organisations, it will come as no surprise that most are categorised as highly opaque by Transparify.

That these unelected, unaccountable neocon linked think tanks, many associated with Tufton St, have had taken the opportunity to influence right-wing ideological Tories to not only impact the outcome of an allegedly free and fair referendum, but to then influence and mould the policies that will define the UK’s future is nothing short of remarkable.

Though not as remarkable as an intransigent, unelected government, placing power and party above country through their total disregard of the emerging facts surrounding the catalyst for Brexit, the referendum.

The Facts

Both Vote Leave and Leave.EU have been found guilty of overspending, with the amount of overspending by Leave.EU indeterminable according to the Electoral Commission.

Vote Leave was fined £61,000 and those involved reported to the police after the regulatory body found significant evidence of collusion with BeLeave whose founder Darren Grimes was also fined £20,000. Leave.EU was fined £70,000 for multiple offences committed under electoral law, their CEO has also been reported to the police as it is believed criminal offences have been committed.

Both Leave campaigns employed questionable tactics and promoted highly misleading information during the referendum, they dismissed the myriad of warnings on the economy as ‘project fear’ yet today the UK has gone from a growth engine to the worst performing economy amongst the G7, the pound has been devalued, our GDP is more than 2% lower than anticipated, we’re all physically poorer and foreign investment into the UK is down by 92%.

Against this backdrop, a government with no mandate, holding on to power courtesy of the DUP, in receipt of what is little more than a £1bn government bribe, who are themselves embroiled in the referendum spending scandal, have gone from one crisis to another whilst failing to make any noticeable progress on the catastrophe the Conservatives have inflicted on the country.

Completing this perfect storm of Conservative collusion, corruption and criminality that’s allowing Brexit to be delivered, we have the Labour opposition, led by former backbench protester, Jeremy Corbyn, who has so far failed to captitalise on the shambles that is Brexit. It’s just another of the great mysteries of Brexit; some feel Labour is playing a long game, others feel their leadership is delusional.

What isn’t a mystery is that there’s a lot of amateurs involved in Brexit, in the Conservative party, the Labour party, amongst Leave.EU and UKIP. They’re all being taken to the cleaners by the likes of Elliott and Cummings who’ve been ahead of the game before most even knew they were in the game, and until the leaders of the main political parties wake up and face up to what they’ve done, illegally obtained a referendum result through cheating and criminality, the country will have the sword of Damocles hanging over it.