Grant Shapps, the Tory party chair, did not “permanently publish” his full name alongside the alias he used when he operated as an “online marketing millionaire” despite claiming that he did so, according to an analysis of hundreds of pages of his website.
The cabinet minister – who as chairman has a pivotal role in the party’s election campaign – has defended casting himself as Michael Green of software firm How To Corp by saying that his real name was “permanently published on the company’s main website”.
Until recently this claim could not be easily verified as the company’s webpages have been removed from the internet.
However, the Guardian has discovered a web archive that has kept copies of more than 700 instances of How To Corp’s homepage and Michael Green “biography” page between 2002 and 2007. A detailed analysis has failed to show any mention of “Grant Shapps” on any of the firm’s webpages examined by the Guardian.
Green’s success was made possible, it appears, by peddling self-help guides and get-rich-quick schemes such as “how to live a happier and less stressed life”, “how to achieve The Swing in golf” and how to “develop your own money-making ezine”. A year after being elected MP for Welwyn Hatfield in 2005, his alter ego Green boasts that he’s been “an overnight online success” and “one of the web’s most successful information product providers”.
The Tory MP now faces a potential legal action from Dean Archer, a local constituent and ex-Labour councillor, who had to delete an allegedly libellous post on a Facebook group that questioned the Tory chair’s use of a pen name.
Archer, a chauffeur who had campaigned against Shapps’ plans to downsize Hatfield council, was forced into posting an apology which explicitly stated that the Tory chairman had “openly published his full name alongside business publications” and that “he used a pen name merely to separate business and politics, prior to entering parliament”.
This lunchtime Archer handed Shapps a legal letter demanding an apology because he says he was forced to “post a statement that now appears to be false”.
Tackled by Martha Kearney on BBC Radio 4’s The World At One, Shapps claimed he had made legal threats because what Archer “wrote was in fact wrong and defamatory – the issue was he said I hadn’t registered it and I had”. Archer did not mention Shapps’ record of entries on the register of MPs’ interests on the allegedly defamatory Facebook post.
When it was put to Shapps that there was no sign of any mention of his real name on hundreds of pages of the company websites, a spokesman for the Tory chairman did not repeat the claim that he had published his true identity on the firm’s main page.
A Conservative party source said: “The party chairman was open and transparent about his interests in his family business, not least through declarations to parliament. In addition, he voluntarily offered information to his constituents online”, adding that in 2005 Shapps told a local web discussion forum that as an MP he would register his “online marketing company”.
Shapps accepted last week that he had a second job as Green while he was an MP, something he had repeatedly denied for three years, after the Guardian discovered a recording from the summer of 2006. In it, as Green, he boasted that his products could make listeners a “ton of cash by Christmas”.
Last week Shapps said in his defence that he had been “completely transparent: his full name and biographical details were permanently published on the company’s main website”.
None of the webpages, ebooks, newsletters or audio recordings stored by the Guardian state that Shapps is Michael Green. When contacted by the Guardian, his lawyers, Hill Dickinson, previously said: “Our client’s full name … [was] permanently accessible on the company website.”
Casting himself as an internet marketing guru with products and coaching services guaranteed to generate income, Shapps owned and ran until 2008 a series of websites making claims that still dog him, despite attempts to downplay his personal role. Using the site MichaelGreenConsulting.com, which operated from 2004 until it was removed from the internet in 2009, Shapps claimed to run the “world’s largest internet marketing forum” with his company How To Corp.
While serving the constituents of Welwyn Hatfield, blogger Tim Ireland pointed out that Shapps also ran phone lines offering expert advice on internet marketing. “The fee for my one-hour phone consultation is $297 (US). I make the call to you, no matter where you are in the world,” the website read. The MP’s business acumen receives a glowing endorsement in an unsolicited testimonial from a “Romeo Salvitti”.
How To Corp was founded by Shapps in 2000 and initially run as a partnership with his wife, Belinda. It was only registered at Companies’ House in 2005 and the Tory MP transferred his share in the firm to his spouse in 2008.
Despite this, an email address used by Shapps for political purposes appeared in a document authored by Green in 2010. In an advice guide called The SEO-1st-Page Toolkit on how to tweak websites so they appear higher up the results of a Google search, a screenshot purporting to show how a search has been successfully manipulated clearly shows the author logged in as “grant@shapps.com”.
Shapps told a parliamentary committee that he could be contacted through the same email address. It also appears on his official website. A party spokesman said this week that “anyone who’s struggled to run a small family business from home knows that when you share a computer with your family it’s easy to stay logged in to a browser”.
How To Corp was dissolved last year after marketing software called TrafficPaymaster, any sale of which, the police said, may have been an “offence of fraud”. TrafficPaymaster, which claimed to produce webpages by “spinning and scraping” content and then seeking to attract advertising – in contravention of Google’s code of conduct – is no longer on sale.
Labour has called for an investigation into the “dodgy business activities” of Shapps. The party described the latest revelations as the “final nail nailed in Shapps’ defence” and questioned the prime minister’s judgment over backing the embattled cabinet minister.
Graham Jones, the Labour whip, said: “Without a full investigation into whether Shapps has misled the public, journalists … and with the possibility of legal action over … misrepresentation in his legal action against a constituent, the prime minister will look as guilty in the eyes of the public as his thoroughly discredited ally, the Tory party chairman.”
It has also emerged that Shapps claimed more than £2,400 in public funds for printing through his own company. The money was paid out via parliamentary expenses five times between 2005 and 2007 for the printing of postcards, letterheads and posters by PrintHouse Corporation, a company based in Acton, London, that Shapps founded and owns.
The Tories said that “all stationery in his parliamentary office was procured competitively: of 193 separate items ordered between 2005 and 2010, just five were supplied by PrintHouse.”
Jones said: “Once again Shapps has serious questions to answer. We need to know that no rule has been broken.”
