Lord Michael Levy on Andrew Marr

Lord Levy, now busily hawking his memoirs, said quite emphatically that it was inconceivable that The Goblin King and Jack Dromey, the Party Treasurer, did not know about the so-called secret loans of £15 million-odd that Labour received to fund the 2005 General Election campaign. Transcript available here soon, hopefully.

Right. There are very strict deadlines for reporting actual campaign expenditure to El Comm. Labour duly reported exenditure of £18 million (see page 58). Labour (like all other political parties) also have to submit annual accounts to El Comm, which they signed off at the last minute of 30 June 2006. Note 8 on page 14 (download from here) shows GE expenses of £15 million (the discrepancy is largely because the £18 million includes expenditure by local branches and so on).

Right, as any fule kno, the accounts summarise money in and money out. They are appear to have got the 'money out' side about right, ergo, the 'money in' must either be income or loans. Again, Note 28 on page 21 of the accounts lists all the soft loans from Sainsbury, Evans, Noon, Patel etc.

So what's so secret about them? Well, until early 2006, it was not common practice or compulsory to publish the lenders' names, but hey, even before then, surely the senior Party figures would have known - as Lord Levy said, all the money went into the normal Labour Party bank accounts. It was a tad underhand taking soft loans rather than donations - the difference being that you have to report the names of donors but not the names of lendersto El Comm - but far from being a crime or anything.

In other words, it's not the loans that were secret (the fact that a Party is in debt has to be shown in the accounts), it was merely that the names of the lenders did not have to be published.

So, seeing as The Goblin King had the nerve to stand up in Parliament and deny that he knew about them makes him a Big Fat Liar. And a stupid one to boot, because he is trying to deny something that a) is true and b) was not an offence anyway.

The precise exchange at PMQs on 30 April was as follows (video here*)

Douglas Carswell "The Prime Minister claims he had no knowledge of the dodgy loans used to fund the 2005 election campaign which he ran. Lord Levy has revealed that the Prime Minister knew everything. Is Lord Levy lying?"

The Goblin King:"I knew nothing of these loans."

* Via The Daily Brute