Grant Shapps: my part in his rise and failure to fall

The political news of the week seems to be Two Kitchens Bad, Three Names Good.

In short, Grant Shapps MP is in trouble again. As I helped with the original story, I thought I'd summarise what happened and explain why I think it's important.

Grant had a business called HowToCorp. Essentially, it was an online version of snake oil, selling 'business secrets' and the like to rubes: titles such as 'How To Make You Own Money Making Mint', How To Bounce Back From Recession' (a volume his colleagues in the Treasure evidently didn't read) and The Meaning of Dreams, a $29.97 reprint of an 'extremely rare' book which could actually be found on the internet for free, or for pennies if you wanted the dead-tree version. Shapps also promoted a classy pamphlet called 'Stinking Rich'. You can read my original piece on these magnificent economic treatises here.

Using the names Michael Green and Sebastian Fox, Grant flounced round shady business seminars and the web flogging these products simultaneously trading on his status as an MP while all three identities denied any links. The other side of the business was TrafficPaymaster, a nasty little bit of software that helped you plagiarise or 'scrape' other people's websites and promised to beat Google's algorithm, which generally took a dim view of this kind of behaviour (hilariously, one of 'Michael Green's booklets is How To STOP Digital Product Theft which suggests buying his crappy software!). He also operated sock-puppet accounts for political dirty tricks and frequently sanitises his Wikipedia page.

All this was exposed thanks to the sterling work of various bloggers and journalists, but it wasn't really going anywhere. However, I was young and angry in those days. And bored. Very, very bored. So I had a look round 'Michael's' websites (now sadly deleted) and smelled a rat when I read the testimonials from satisfied customers. So I spent a good few hours trying to track them down. Nothing. One had the same name as a minor PG Wodehouse character but the rest appeared to have no web presence (despite being enthusiastic web marketers) and some of their locations appeared not to exist. So I reported the sites to the Advertising Standards Authority and chronicled events here and here.

That got quite a lot of attention, including this classic piece of Shapps and Michael Crick charging round a conference venue like Benny Hill.



But he got away with it. He withdrew the adverts rather than go through an investigation, which allowed him to claim – without evidence – that his testimonials were all genuine. He dismissed me as 'politically motivated', a criticism that still sounds a little odd coming from a Member of Parliament and Chairman of the Conservative Party. A police report concluded that while Shapps' company's activities 'may constitute an offence of fraud', an investigation was dropped. Why? Who knows? No satisfactory explanation was given.

So that seemed to be that, until this weekend. Grant's had a glorious career as the Tory Party's bullshitter in chief, turning up to defend the indefensible whenever no more senior politicians could be bothered to turn up. But some journalists have stuck to the story, and this is why it's still alive. Shapps recorded an interview on LBC radio three weeks ago denying that he'd carried on the business while an MP (this was during the Double Jobbing Scandal), but someone unearthed a video of him saying that he did:



And all this having used legal threats to force a constituent to remove a Facebook post detailing his activities as libellous…despite it turning out to be true. I've been pretty (justifiably) rude over the years about my disgusting MP Paul Uppal, but he hasn't set his briefs on me.

So why is this story still alive? It's pretty simple. Shapps/Green/Fox's business was a spivvy, seedy little operation, but the real story is that last bit: using the law to cover up a lie. He isn't just some dodgy businessman, he holds public office and should answer to a higher standard. He's a powerful man who deliberately silenced justified criticism using the law.

The wider story is the debasement of public life. Politicians have always associated themselves with shady businessmen, but rarely so blatantly. I can't imagine Douglas-Home, Macmillan or Balfour promoting someone like Shapps, author of Stinking Rich. While the PM and Chancellor go round talking about The Rise of the Makers and fiscal prudence, their closest colleagues flog rip-off pamphlets promising that you can 'Make $20,000 in 20 Days Or Your Money Back'.

This morning the Tory spin machine is in full swing. There are two lines of attack. Alongside others, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt (who has also made millions in a pretty dubious web-marketing line which didn't treat its employees very well after several other businesses failed: funny that he's happy to slag off welfare dependency while his own business depended on contracts with the state) claims that this proves Labour and the Guardian are 'anti-business',

while Nadine Dorries (who when called out about her lies claimed that her blog was actually 70% fiction and presumably be viewed as art) reckons that Shapps is identical to JK Rowling, who used a pen-name.

Except of course that JK Rowling is an author, didn't set lawyers on a Facebook poster and didn't lie to a radio station. Nor, of course, does she hold public office.

Nadine also reckons that:

Yes, all the best business withdraw their advertising and get banned by Google for being copyright thieves, plagiarists and cheats.

What we have here is the progressive loss of a moral compass, in the political class in general and in the Conservative Party in particular. Shapps is the latest in a long line of cheats and bullies at the heart of government. Andy Coulson's in prison. Rebekah Brooks miraculously escaped it. Hunt and Shapps are spins, while Shapps is demonstrably a liar, though his defence is that he 'screwed up dates' while 'over-firmly' denying allegations. Clarkson apparently punches people while drunkenly abusing them for being Irish, while Hamilton, Archer, Asil Nadir and Aitken rattle their bones in the background. There's a pattern of shady behaviour which the classic old Tory party wouldn't have condoned: these types would have been despatched to the library with a bottle of whisky and revolver. But now politics is about the sales pitch, they come to the fore, and as long as they ride out the news cycles, they're OK – principles are so old hat.

What does this mean for the world of social media? Having played some small part in this saga, I think it demonstrates the symbiotic nature of social media and journalism. I heard the original story via the newspapers. I followed it by doing some digging of my own, which was picked up by TV and newspapers. Then the story went dead until a radio station asked Shapps the question and The Guardian unearthed the video that proves he was double-jobbing. I think we need each other. Bloggers don't have editors demanding instant results. We have the freedom to get obsessed with small details that may turn out to be important, and we have the ability to harp on about things to semi-interested audiences. Professional journalists though have time, training and resources, plus the credibility that comes with a cover price and masthead.

Will Shapps go? I doubt it. There's an election coming and resignations tend to overshadow photo-ops. People tell us that we should be more engaged in politics. Then they select and promote specimens like this and wonder why we aren't.

Torybingogate

The 2014 Budget was predictable enough: savage attacks on environmentalism, treats for corporate Tory donors, pensioners abandoned to the mercies of the market, and bribes for core Tory voters: very much a standard election-year model.

What made it stand out was Tory chairman Grant Shapps' idea of appealing to the electorate in the form of this poster:

Presumably this was the work of some bright young thing in Tory HQ, but a number of senior people must have approved it for release. What's wrong with it? The use of 'they' distances the Conservatives and their government from 'hardworking people' which either seems arrogant or honest depending on whether you think our political leaders are hardworking or not. Then there's the assumption that the electorate are so simple as to be concerned only with 1p off beer tax and the implication that bingo is cheap.

It's almost as if the Conservative leadership still relates to the working classes like this:



So the tone's wrong, the positioning's wrong and on top of that, it's dishonest: the Bingo operators' association says that the tax break won't make a difference to their customers' charges at all. So it's just a gift to the gambling industry to encourage further Tory donations.

But there's another angle. We read all the time about parties' sophisticated electoral strategies, databanks, imported advisors etc. And yet it seems there's nobody with any understanding of the electorate and certainly nobody who has ever used the internet before. Could Grant Shapps – no stranger to online shenanigans – not foresee the mocking Twitterstorm that followed his encouragement to 'Please RT'. First came the horrified scorn. Then came the witty Tory Bingo calls with the hashtag #Torybingo, and finally along came Torybingo.com, which allows the likes of us to adapt the original template. Here are a couple of mine:

I assume that the Tories (and other parties) have heard of the phrase 'going viral' and want a chunk of it. What they haven't understood is that social media users have finely-attuned antennae for corporate propaganda, and a level playing field on which to fight it. This is, of course, why corporate interests are trying (and winning) the fight to turn the internet from an public square into a tightly-controlled pseudo-public space. Try as they might, institutions are too cumbersome and culturally-deaf to compete with the wit of some kid with Photoshop and no paymaster. Politicians and corporate executives get offended when we parody their products because they genuinely believe that the social hierarchies of meatspace are a) natural and b) should be reproduced online. Torybingo is just the latest in a pretty much infinite line of embarrassments.

The only down side is that while ridicule is a key weapon of postmodern resistance, it's not entirely clear whether it actually helps. For all this, the key Tory voter (rich white bitter older people) will vote in droves while the young and hip won't bother. Is this anything more than a passing amusement? I'm not sure.

Student Grant

I knew last night's edition of Question Time would be a humdinger. Left-leaning Medhi Hasan versus the Daily Mail's Quentin Letts days after that paper called Miliband Sr. 'evil' promised fireworks, and we got them.



So that was fun. But for me, the presence of Grant Shapps, MP, Conservative Party Chairman and possible money-launderer, was equally attractive. You see, Grant and I have history. It was me who complained to the Advertising Standards about his shady company's practice of putting together crappy little money-making documents, selling them under the names of 'Michael Green MP' and other pseudonyms, and proclaiming endorsements from large numbers of people who don't exist. As a result, Shapps agreed to withdraw the adverts rather than face an ASA ruling. His companies were also banned from Google's rankings for 'scraping': stealing other sites' copy to attract clicks.

The most amusing bit was when Shapps was asked by the media about my complaint: he dismissed it as 'politically motivated', which seems a bit strange coming from a man who has devoted at least one of his personalities to being an MP and Chairman of Britain's oldest political parties.

So as you can imagine, I look forward to Grant's appearances on shows like QT with considerable relish. For me, the English language developed solely to provide the word 'glib' for application to Mr Shapps. Last night's episode was a true vintage. Smug, sneering, evasive, patronising, facetious and mendacious, good old Grant gave a master-class in modern Conservative manners.

But amongst all the other fun, one sentence Grant uttered caught my attention. While evading any discussion of the economy in favour of another unfounded attack on Keynesianism, he said to Yvette Cooper of the Labour Party 'You can't just magic money from nowhere' (around the 50 minute mark). 'That's funny', I thought. I have a dim memory of Grant Shapps' alter ego Michael Green insisting (for money) that you really can. In fact, isn't that his entire business model?

Two minutes later, I find this delightful document from the Shapps family firm, HowToCorp.

And what a magnificent opus it is:

Michael Green spent 12 years building his conventional offline business before turning his hand to online marketing on a strictly part-time basis.
And from a standing start – as recently as February 2002 – Michael has created his online How To Corp business empire! 

Part-time is right!

And how does one make all this money?

you can make money overnight, you can have success, you can earn a 6 figure income, you can do all of these things 

Easy: sack your staff:

I have been in the printing business for 12 years, you could not find a more traditional, conventional business than printing, you have stock, you have paper, people and management, all those personnel issues and so on....
What attracted me to the internet business model is that I can do away with all of those things and I can make as much money or more money, but it goes directly into my pocket, it doesn't go to anyone else, I don't need staff, I don't need premises. 

The rest of this dismal document is blindingly obvious business tips of the kind you get from 5 minutes' Googling, although I was amused by the suggestion that other internet marketers can't be trusted:

very well known names in internet marketing…sell similar 'How To' products and I think they are very dishonest 

Not like Grant/Michael at all. Interestingly, he also plugs 'Costly Internet Blunders' by one 'Rick Adams', also published by the Shapps company. Is Rick actually Grant? Who can tell? But that particular volume is no longer available. Perhaps it's being updated to include the sorry tale of Grant Shapps.

'Michael Green' is a very honest man. It says so here:

Protect your own success by preventing others from stealing what’s rightfully yours.

I am seeing people in real time trying to steal my products 

And yet here's the Daily Telegraph reporting that his company has been caught plagiarising software. I hope Grant's having a serious word with…himself.

But having read all 24 pages of Michael Green's guide to making a mint, what actually is the secret? Well, here we go! All you need to do is

Click Here And Discover How To Make 'Real' Money Online By Developing & Selling Your Very Own Products.
Find Out About Michael Green's Private System For Creating Wealth - Now Revealed For The First Time In His Amazing New Easy-To-Follow Toolkit. 

That's right. The big secret is that you need to buy another Michael Green business guide.

Ironically, given that 'Michael Green' is actually a senior government politician, you can still get 'How To Bounce Back From Recession', which I presume the rest of the Conservative Party hasn't read, or we'd all be rich again.

Remember, folks: there's an election in 2015.

Back to Shapps

Note for new readers: a summary of my dealings with the ASA and Shapps can be found here.

A final note with regard to Grant Shapps. Despite officially having nothing to do with HowToCorp, he seems to know an awful lot about the company's dealings with the Advertising Standards Authority.

That indefatigable reporter, Michael Crick, is still pursuing Mr Shapps, who is still insisting - despite my research and that of many others - that all the company's testimonials were genuine (despite his business selling material including 'How To Solicit Testimonials Easily, Quickly and on Autopilot'. He's telling all and sundry that the ASA has accepted that they are real too. This is a flat-out lie. According to my letter from the ASA, they agreed not to investigate my suspicions after HowToCorp promised not to run the offending material any more. This is, of course, a tacit acknowledgement of guilt.

Obviously I'd like to know why the ASA decided not to investigate, but for some reason it's exempt from Freedom of Information legislation. They won't show me the assurances HowToCorp sent them, nor any other material - despite the company seeing my complaint and personal details. It stinks, frankly. Mr Shapps could of course release all these documents, but he certainly won't.

So to be completely clear: Grant Shapps is a liar. HowToCorp's adverts have not been cleared: they've been withdrawn without investigation.

Pay attention at the back: Michael Green has something to say

Meet Michael Green. He's written the 'must-read guide to bouncing back from recession to growth'. I don't know who said that, because there's no quote attribution, but I strongly suspect it was Michael Green, because - as will become clear - attribution is somewhat tricky with 'Michael Green'.

In case you're not good with metaphors, there's an illustration to go with 'Michael Green's' text:

It's a fascinating book - breezily (and illiterately) written with a healthy dose of distrust for 'The Experts' and a rock-solid faith that 'There Is Daylight Ahead', 'a penny saved is a penny earned', and that you should 'Make Lemonade From Lemons'. It's a mix of very familiar clichés, Alan Sugar-style bluster and Alcoholics Anonymous positive thinking ('Decide To Recover'). Then it veers into a kind of Internet Scamming for Dummies. 

The origins and extent of the recession take up all of two pages (no complicated or subtle economic theory needed here), and the perpetrators appear to be 'foreigners', quickly followed by 'the government', which is firmly in the 'Experts' (always within scare quotes) camp. And anyway, the recession has been good for us all - it's just that our moaning means we can't see the benefits to us as well as to the '1%':

Get up off your arse and MAKE MONEY! And in case you're worried that all those around you are suffering, GET A LIFE. Out comes the classic Tory/Samuel Smiles line: 'Be as good to you as you can - do not sacrifice yourself for everyone else's comfort all the time'. Because FTSE CEO's definitely didn't take a 43% pay rise the year after the crash. No sir. 

Anyway, Bouncing Back continues in this platitudinous vein for 34 pages. Why am I delighting you with the insights of 'Michael Green'? Well, it's because he's got form. Firstly, 'Michael Green' runs a company called TrafficPaymaster, which will sell you software to fool Google's algorithms to up traffic to websites and therefore increase advertising revenues. You know the kind: you Google something, hit a promising link only to discover that it's a random accretion of other people's work scraped together to drive ads for more protuberant genitalia and so on. It's not, to put it mildly, a classy way to make a living. The word 'spiv' springs to mind. But it is the kind of 'get rich quick' scheme beloved of people who'll try to sell a book advising you to make lemonade from life's lemons. How quick? Well, 'Michael Green' told his marks customers that they could

"make $20,000 in 20 days guaranteed or your money back" – if they spent $200 buying his bespoke software.

even though Google has some strong words for this kind of parasitic behaviour:

Its AdSense policy says: "Sometimes we come across sites that are using software to generate automated content. These sites might look like normal news sites, but the information is completely plagiarised. Scraping content and passing it off as one's own is not only wrong, but it also happens to be a serious violation of our policies."

But you're probably still wondering why I'm devoting space and time to the seedy spivvery of some no0mark internet scamster. The truth is that 'Michael Green' doesn't exist. He's a pseudonym for one Grant Shapps. That's Grant Shapps MP. Grant Shapps, Minister of State for Housing in the UK Government. The Grant Shapps who is tipped for promotion in tomorrow's Cabinet reshuffle. 

It's funny, I grant you. It reinforces all my previous prejudices about the kind of shady types who become Tories, and about Mr Shapps in particular. But it's also profoundly depressing. In public, Shapps makes speeches about investment, and the 'real economy', and innovation - all the usual buzz-words. But with his secret identities - several, adopted, he claims, to keep his business and political lives separate, and I can see why - he abandons the public good, society, 'all in it together' and tells the suckers who listen to him that the real way to prosper is to abandon everyone else, forget making or designing things, and simply pull off a scam. 

Sadly, 'Michael Green' hasn't entirely managed to prevent his shady and dishonest tactics from crossing the barrier between his brain and Grant Shapps'. Anyone perusing @GrantShapps might notice that for a busy MP and Minister, he follows an awful lot of people - over 24,000, with roughly 55,000 followers. That's a lot of reading even for a Twitter obsessive such as myself. And that's not all: busy Grant follows and unfollows about 300 people a day, presumable while he's on his tea break. It is of course entirely coincidental that his (now technically his wife's) company recommended an app called TweetAdder for the purposes for getting a 'BIG' following by, er, automated mass following and unfollowing. 

As he's a government minister, he's presumed to be amongst the best 25 or so brains in the combined parties' ranks. Now that's a scary thought. 

So far we've had David Laws fiddling his expenses. Jeremy Hunt hides between trees and secretly promotes the interests of Rupert Murdoch over the public good, Michael Gove using his wife's email address to hide his dodgy and partisan dealings in the education sphere (in an attempt to evade the Freedom of Information Act), and Liam Fox forced to resign after he failed to make any distinction between his friends' arms-dealing and intelligence businesses, sinister military-industrial pressure groups and his responsibilities as a government minister. 

This isn't just a matter of competence or political differences: the recurrence of very similar cases in which government ministers are found operating in the grey areas legally and morally suggests that after only two years, this government is rotten. It can't seem to find a minister able to elevate the public interest over and above his own pursuit of money, power or influence. At the top, of course, is a prime minister incapable of making the right kinds of value judgements. No wonder we're in a mess. 

Open government…

What's our favourite MP, Paul Uppal, spending our time and money on now?

To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government with reference to the answer of 27 March 2012, Official Report, column 1063W, on statistics,
(1) if he will request a formal pre-release investigation into the tweeting by a BBC journalist on 2 December 2012 of the section 16 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 notification letter issued by the UK Statistics Authority prior to it being issued on 6 December 2012;
(2) whether any staff of the UK Statistics Authority communicated to the BBC the intention to make a notification under section 16 of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 prior to the formal notification on 6 December 2012.

Not the most accessible use of English, I grant you, but trust me: he's up to no good. The background is this: Housing Minister Grant Shapps - the epitome of smug Tory spivvery - got caught being, let's say, 'creative' with statistics, beyond the flexibility we usually expect of government ministers.

The Labour Party reported his abuse of the facts to the Statistics Authority, whose duty it is to vet and assess all figures used by government - a fine and essential organisation. The SA agreed that there's a problem and wrote to Mr Shapps asking to review his department's approach to stats, and Mr Shapps told them to sod off and then mentioned the war in the course of his attack on Labour's (admittedly poor) record on house-building.

Enter Mr Uppal. Is he overjoyed that a housing or statistics scandal is being exposed by a free press determined to hold power to account? No, don't be silly. He wants the whole thing hushed up, and is trying to start a witch-hunt against the civil servants he suspects notified the BBC of the decision to investigate Shapps' department.

Did the Bolshevik Broadcasting Authority suborn some fellow-traveller in the UK Statistics Authority in an attempt to subvert the sterling work of Mr Shapps?

In respect of (ii), when considering such matters the Authority's staff will provide officials in the relevant department(s) with information on the Authority's intentions. Officials at the Department for Communities and Local Government were therefore informed in respect of the Authority's intentions.
The Authority's staff will respond similarly to enquiries from interested parties, and following a subsequent enquiry to the Authority representatives of the BBC were advised of the Authority's intention to write to Ministers under section 16 of the 2007 Act.

Er… no. They clearly phoned up and asked what was happening. As the department had been notified, the Stats Authority released the information. Perfectly properly.