Johnson quashes supreme court action over £350m Brexit claim – The Guardian

Campaigner denied leave to appeal to supreme court over PM’s referendum claim

Claim Britain sends the EU £350m a week was emblazoned on the red campaign bus used by the leave campaign.
Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

A campaigner has lost his bid to take Boris Johnson to the supreme court over the prime minister’s claim the UK gave £350 million a week to the EU.

Johnson was summonsed by Westminster Magistrates Court in May to face face three allegations of misconduct in public office, over comments he made before the EU referendum, in a private prosecution brought by Marcus Ball.

The summons was ruled unlawful and quashed by high court judges at a hearing in June.

Ball’s legal team then filed an application for permission to appeal to the supreme court over the ruling.

The application was rejected on Wednesday by Lady Justice Rafferty, one of the high court judges who quashed the original decision.

In a brief announcement, she said: “This application for leave to appeal to the supreme court is rejected.”

Ball now has the option to apply directly to the supreme court for permission.

The £350m-a-week claim was emblazoned on the red campaign bus used by the leave campaign prior to the referendum, with the slogan saying: “We send the EU 350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead.”

Giving reasons for the high court’s original ruling, Rafferty said the “problem of false statements in the course of political campaigning is not new”. She said parliament had enacted laws to deal with “certain false campaign statements which it considers an illegal practice”.

However, she said this did not include false statements relating to publicly available statistics, and found that the district judge’s decision would have “extended the scope” of the offence of misconduct in a public office.