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Telegraph | News | Christopher Booker’s Notebook: “The invisible official campaign”

With only a month to go before the North-East’s referendum on an elected regional assembly, the disastrous result for the Conservatives at the Hartlepool by-election again highlights the curious decision by the Electoral Commission to designate as the official ‘No’ campaign a group known as ‘North-East Says No’ (Nesno), run by the Tories.

Last week Neil Herron of the rival and long-established ‘North-East No’ campaign - which, to the surprise of local people, did not get the designation - received a telephone call from the Electoral Commission in London. The caller had been told to travel north to hand over the commission’s cheque for �100,000. He had searched for ‘Nesno’ on the internet but all the resulting references had led him to Mr Herron’s ‘North-East No’ campaign. So could he please be told how to contact the now-official ‘No’ campaign?

Mr Herron naturally obliged. But many people would like to know how the Electoral Commission came to give taxpayers’ money to an organisation so inept that it offers John Prescott his only hope of winning the November 4 referendum - and so obscure that even the commission has difficulty in finding it.”