Chester MP Chris Matheson demanded pro-Brexit Tory members Michael Gove and Boris Johnson provide answers after their Vote Leave group was fined £61,000 for exceeding its £7m spending limit in the 2016 EU referendum campaign.

The Electoral Commission said the group broke the law when it funnelled an undeclared £675,315 through pro-Brexit youth group BeLeave.

BeLeave founder Darren Grimes has been fined £20,000 and referred to the police, along with Vote Leave official David Halsall.

Vote Leave campaign, which was fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, won the contest to be the official Leave campaign in the 2016 referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union. Vote Leave said the ‘wholly inaccurate’ report was politically-motivated.

Gove comments on segregation
Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

A firm Remainer, Mr Matheson, in his role as Labour' s shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, made a statement in parliament on the outcome of the inquiry.

He said: “Senior members of the government were involved in the Vote Leave campaign including the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Michael Gove MP) and the recently departed Foreign Secretary (Boris Johnson) who is uncharacteristically silent today.

“Will they now come to this House and explain their role in the initial scandal?”

He added: “Yet again we have been confronted this week by the chaos this government has got itself and the country into, dumping its own Euro civil war on the rest of us and sowing division throughout. Its Brexit extremists are at war with their own prime minister and a government that at every stage has put party before country.

“Honourable members in this House and the public are entitled to ask how on earth we have got here. British politics and the British people deserve better than this. Let me ask the minister: what is her proposal to bring decent, honest politics back to the fore because if this government has not got any perhaps it’s time they moved aside for a government that has.”

Conservative MP Chloe Smith

Cabinet minister Chloe Smith MP said: “Mr Speaker, given the Labour front bench is so committed to propriety perhaps it should be reporting itself to the police for its national spending in the 2015 general election whereupon the Labour Party was fined by the Electoral Commission in October 2016. They are on thin ice if they think they are able to say that this cuts only one way. It does not.”

She added: “There are questions that arise here from this investigation and others which are still ongoing and this ought to be looked at in the round in due course and the government, where appropriate , will come back to this House, of course, to do so.”