Shahmir Sanni co-founded BeLeave, an offshoot of the Vote Leave campaign, during the EU Referendum. He turned whistleblower last year when he exposed its law-breaking. Here he reveals how two of the contenders to replace Theresa May cannot absolve themselves of responsibility.

The UK’s Electoral Commission has published the results of a near nine-month-long investigation into Brexit referendum spending and has found that the official Vote Leave campaign broke the law by breaching election campaign spending limits.

The development of Brexit from a fringe movement into a dominant political project coincided chronologically not only with a long period of patient and sustained campaigning and lobbying, and with a lucky sequence of favourable shifts of circumstance and forces, but also with the internal development of one key external force, the politics and ideology of the Putin regime.