Bingham & Levitt trading blows on Ashcroft

You may have noticed that not long after our last post appeared, the High Peak MP Tom Levitt issued his own press release* about the Ashcroft funding issue. Levitt waded in with his political size-nines accusing Ashcroft of funding High Peak Conservative Association (HPCA) to the tune of £110,000, and published a letter he had written to Andrew Bingham regarding the issue.

Levitt was relying on an article in the Independent Newspaper (not published online), but in his reply Andrew Bingham was quick to point out that £110,000 was the total income received by HPCA for 2 years, and not the amount received from Tory Central Office. That'll be Tom Levitt finding his size nines have had the laces tied together.

Other than that, there's little point in regurgitating the tit-for-tat, party political guff. But what is misleading is when Bingham states that HPCA has not received money directly from either Ashcroft or his companies, and that certain funding comes directly from central office - this is disingenuous because it's well known that Ashcroft's money lands in target constituencies in this way, as we outlined in our original post about this issue.

*when Levitt's website disappears, you can view a screen grab of this page here