Delingpole: Darren Grimes and the Death of Britain’s Deep State

Pro-Brexit activists hold placards and wave Union flags as they demonstrate outside of the
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James Delingpole

Anyone who imagines that Britain’s Deep State is a conspiracy theory really should listen to my interview with Darren Grimes: the butterfly that Britain’s left-leaning Remainer Establishment tried to break upon a wheel.

Grimes tells the moving, shocking, but ultimately uplifting story of how that pernicious Establishment tried to destroy him for no real reason other than that he had contributed to Vote Leave’s victory in the EU referendum and it needed an easy target on which to vent its rage.

He was a penniless fashion student at the time, a working class lad from the North East. But because of his communications and tech skills, he found himself drafted in to help with the 2016 campaign to leave the EU.

And that’s when his troubles began: because he had ticked the wrong box on a confusing and ambiguous form to do with election spending limits, Grimes found himself pursued by the Electoral Commission which wanted to fine him £20,000 and have him investigated by the police. It ended when a judge ruled, in no uncertain terms, that Grimes had absolutely no case to answer.

I’ve written before about the Electoral Commission — an incompetent, thoroughly dishonest, Remain-biased quango run by mostly Labour and Lib-Dem placemen — about its role in the Darren Grimes affair and about why it should be scrapped.

But what I hadn’t fully appreciated, until I met Grimes and heard his story, was just how cruel, vindictive, and entirely unnecessary this case was.

It cost the taxpayer £500,000.

And to what end?

Essentially to assuage the petulant rage of Remoaners including a Buzzfeed journalist and an activist lawyer called Jolyon Maugham QC who kept pressing the Electoral Commission to pursue Grimes to the ends of the earth for his achingly trivial ticked-the-wrong-box crime.

Perhaps in their angry imaginations, inflamed by Brexit Derangement Syndrome, these bitter Remoaners seriously imagined Darren was a target worthy of a half a million quid’s worth of legal action, courtesy of you and me, the taxpayers…

But the point about living in a democracy with well established legal principles, surely, is that angry, rich, privileged, foppish Establishment stooges like Jolyon Maugham QC shouldn’t be able to use the system to crush and impoverish working class lads like Darren just because they feel a bit miffed.

Grimes — as you’ll hear: and it really is an extraordinary story — came that close to having his life ruined by this case.

The most touching bit is when he describes how his Mam offered to fund his case by selling her proudest possession: the council house she had managed to buy thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy in the Eighties.

As a result of the trauma, Darren found God — and is now a regular worshipper in London’s High Church Anglican services. He’s also, needless to say, much stronger for having fought the corrupt system and won.

The latest update to this story is that the Electoral Commission has now decided not to act on its threat to appeal the judge’s decision.

This is good news, obviously for Grimes. Good news too for the taxpayer who is now spared heaven knows how many more hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of unnecessary expense pursuing a vexatious and frivolous case the Electoral Commission was bound to lose again.

But the best news of all, I think, is what it tells us about the future of the Deep State.

I believe under Britain’s new Trumpian administration its days are numbered.

This is largely down to the fact that Boris Johnson’s senior advisor/hatchetman Dominic Cummings is a sworn enemy of the Deep State. He loathes the sclerotic, politicised, right-on Civil Service — of which institutions like the Electoral Commission are very much part — because during his time as Special Advisor to Michael Gove at the Department of Education he saw for himself how it continually sabotages any conservative policies likely to Make Britain Great Again.

Obviously I’m simplifying things here, but not by much. Many, if not all, of you reading this will have found yourself wondering aghast what has become of Britain this last decade or so. It feels as though it has been captured by a narrow clique — Europhile, politically correct, globalist — whose values have little in common with those of the country at large.

The overthrow of this liberal elite is long overdue. The hounding of Darren Grimes — and his more recent court victory — may well be one of its turning points.

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