Arron Banks is hoping to become some kind of Brexit martyr, but even that won't legitimise his propaganda

If you want to judge the potential severity of the criminal investigation into Arron Banks, a good place to start is the seriousness with which Banks himself is taking it.

Four days after the EU referendum, a formal statement was issued by Leave.EU, the campaign group he set up, which included the following “apologies” to two organisations investigating him:

“The Electoral Commission, aka the legal division of the IN campaign – bite me.”

“The Information Commissioner’s Office – whatever.”

On Thursday it was announced that the Electoral Commission has kindly followed his instructions, the bite it has delivered coming in the form of a referral to the National Crime Agency of its findings that Banks may not be the source of an £8m donation to the Brexit campaign, but that he was merely a front through which the money was donated from a foreign source, which is illegal under electoral law.

Banks denies the allegations, but he has done so in a rather less ebullient tone than has become customary for a Bristol-based insurance broker who likes to imagine himself a man of the people for no greater reason than his having been to a terrible boarding school instead of a decent one.

“I am pleased that the Electoral Commission has referred me to the National Crime Agency. I am confident that a full and frank investigation will finally put an end to the ludicrous allegations levelled against me and my colleagues,” he said.

“There is no evidence of any wrongdoing from the companies I own. I am a UK taxpayer and I have never received any foreign donations. The Electoral Commission has produced no evidence to the contrary.”

That’s two whole paragraphs in which Banks doesn’t appear to have been rude to anyone. That should set alarm bells ringing. Of course, what happens to Banks is not the real story here. It is also not for us to speculate on his guilt or innocence, of whatever the specific charges might be.

But it will certainly give the public the chance to consider the veracity of some of Banks’s more fanatical claims.

In April 2016, he was asked about claims that leaving the EU would cost every British household an average of £2,000, which is not a lot of money to Arron Banks, but is a lot of money to the average household.

“I don’t think when people were storming up the beaches of Normandy they were saying, ‘This is going to cost us two thousand quid,’” he told them, laughing.

But it will be entertaining to see what Banks himself considers a fair personal price for Brexit. In the last two years, I have called Banks I believe seven times. To the best of my recollection, those calls have been answered while skiing in the Italian Alps, at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, or on various Caribbean islands.

Should such a lifestyle find itself curtailed, will Banks actually enjoy his new life as the great martyr to Brexit? As Ukip’s Antonio Gramsci, whiling away the years of injustice, feverishly hammering out abusive press releases? As Banks will surely know, the poet Rilke used to claim that no poet would object going to prison, since he could not be held captive from the treasure house of his mind.

And what a treasure house to explore. It has only been after the EU referendum that the Banks clan of the Leave campaign have revealed their true colours. Once Farage and co managed to badge up their right-wing tendencies as a principled campaign to leave an undemocratic institution. Now they just latch on to whatever divisive cause they can find. Farage himself has been on the notorious US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars show, claiming that the left “allies itself with radical Islam” because it hates Christianity.

Banks has thought long and hard about how to turn Leave.EU into a British version of Italy’s Five Star Movement, though even the most generous reviewer of his progress so far would struggle to award it more than one.

Still, who knows what he might achieve with a bit of dedicated thinking time. It’s worked wonders for others of his stripe before.