And I know some of you read the interview with Aaron Banks in last week's Observer but I keep going back to it because I can't believe what he said:
He's the biggest political donor in British political history. He poured £7m into the Leave campaign, more than any other donor. He donated his office space, computer equipment and senior staff. And now he and Farage and other cronies are aiming to 'dislodge' all bad MPs, meaning those who voted Remain. He is working with Steve Hilton, David Cameron's former head of strategy to come up with a points system which grades these MPs and from that he'll formulate a 'target list of the most hated people' and then fund the campaign to remove them.
He enjoys telling how he 'won' the Leave campaign - "as businessmen, we sat down with a clean sheet of paper and said 'how do we beat these people (i.e. the Remain campaign) and we figured out how the mainstream media works and we turned it back on them.....we spent £12-14m on the campaign. We calculated what our column inches and TV coverage was worth. It was over £150m."
Banks claims that he doesn't give a monkey about the Electoral Commission and any investigations they carry out, "we were cleverer than the regulators and the politicians, of course we were."
The article goes on to talk about the large scale collection and manipulation of personal data and the way in which this is totally changing the face of elections. In future it's going to be who has the money and power to control what gets published and seen. Some won't understand this, some will find it hard to believe. Perhaps I have a head start because my husband is working on the edges of this field.
Banks says "we know everything about everyone. We buy everything. The battle for data is where the next election will be fought." It's already happening with Brexit.