Serious questions for Pickles on the Tory election campaign

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

There’s a disturbing story in the Mirror today that suggests that Tory HQ was using private detectives to spy on potential “ordinary” Tory backers as part of a high profile poster campaign. Political Scrapbook has the details.

This raises several questions which should be answered by Eric Pickles, who was Tory Party chair at the time, and in charge of the election campaign. The questions Pickles must answer are:

1) Who were these payments signed off by? Was David Cameron aware of these payments? Were you?
2) What other private detective work (if any) was carried out by CCHQ in the run up to the general election?
3) What involvement (if any) did Andy Coulson have in the decision to employ private investigators?

At a time when the public are understandably concerned about surveillance in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, it is imperitive that the Tories come clean about their use of private investigators, so that we can be confident that they avoided any dirty tricks in a bid to win electoral advantage. The public will expect nothing less than complete transparency.