In his capacity as Conservative chairman, Grant Shapps will welcome the media to his party’s conference in Birmingham this weekend, so it’s unfortunate that he’s increasingly a figure of ridicule. As Ed Miliband caustically observed in his conference speech:
We’ve got a Party Chairman who writes books about how to beat the recession, under a false name. Really, I’m not making this up; I’m really not making this up. I mean I have to say if I was Chairman of the Conservative Party, I’d have a false name too.
That false name was “Michael Green” (and/or “Sebastian Fox”) and, following a complaint by blogger The Plashing Vole, Shapps is now under investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ASA will respond to claims that Shapps’s website, HowToCorp (which now exists only as a help page for existing users), misled the public by implying that “Sebastian Fox” or “Michael Green” were “real people”, and that the glowing testimonies they attracted were “genuine”.
Green was presented as a successful businessman with a personal fortune of $28 million (£17 million) who could make customers “$20,000 in 20 days” through the software package, TrafficPaymaster (while also providing a Partridge-esque guide on how to “bounce back” from recession), or offer them their money back. An ASA spokesman told the Vole:
We intend to deal with your complaint under our formal investigations procedure, which means that we will ask HowToCorp to comment on the complaint that the ad misleadingly implies Sebastian Fox or Michael Green are real people, and that the testimonies are not genuine, and to send evidence to support the claims. We will then draft a recommendation and refer your complaint to the ASA council for adjudication.
A spokesman for Shapps, who stepped down from the company in 2008, said: “Mr Shapps hasn’t been involved with this company for four and a half years. These websites are no longer online and any blogger can make a spurious complaint about any website, which then has to be investigated. This is in the hands of the ASA.”
In the absence of Andrew Mitchell, who has elected to stay away from the Tory gathering, it is Shapps who will be the media’s prime target. Of the former, David Davis observed that it would be “very, very difficult” for him to do his job. Could the same now be said of Shapps?
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