Rowntree trust gives grant to Orkney Four

A POLITICAL trust which contributed £50,000 towards Northern Isles MP Alistair Carmichael’s legal bill following a failed bid to unseat him has donated money to the campaign which brought the case the court.

The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (JRRT) has given £5,000 to four Orkney constituents who challenged the Liberal Democrat MP’s re-election in May last year after he admitted lying about leaking a memo in order to undermine the SNP.

The People Versus Carmichael campaign is still £6,000 short of its legal bill despite having already raised £210,050 largely through crowdfunding.

Carmichael’s final cost for defending the challenge is estimated to have been around the £150,000 mark.

The MP won his case at the Court of Session in Edinburgh in December, but he was ordered to foot his own bill.

A spokesperson for the campaign group said the donation from the trust shows that it has a bona fide interest in “promoting public debate”.

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“We are very pleased that the JRRT has awarded us this money because it shows that it is genuinely promoting public debate and accepting that citizens have a legitimate right to challenge their MPs using due legal process and other democratic means,” they said.

“We took our MP to an election court to have the Orkney and Shetland result in the 2015 general election overturned and wanted a by-election to be held, because the electorate was not in full possession of the facts before voting. Our case was deemed justified by the election court, although it failed on a legal technicality.”

The JRRT is a private company founded by the same Yorkshire confectioner, philanthropist and liberal who founded the social research charity Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It says it will donate a total of £1.2 million towards various political campaigns this year.