Arron Banks, the insurers and my strange data trail

Carole Cadwalladr just wanted to insure her car. Six months later, she found a mass of personal details held by a firm she had never contacted that is run by Leave.EU's biggest donor, Arron Banks. How did it get there?

If a 29-year-old Peugeot 309 is the answer, it's fair to wonder: what on earth is the question? In fact, I had no idea about either the question or the answer when I submitted a "subject access request" to Eldon Insurance Services in December last year. Or that my car - a vehicle that dates from the last millennium - could hold any sort of clue to anything. If there's one thing I've learned, however, in pursuing the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it's that however weird things look, they can always get weirder.

Because I was simply seeking information, as I have for the last 16-plus months, about what the Leave campaigns did during the referendum - specifically, what they did with data. And the subject access request - a legal mechanism I'd learned about from Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data expert - was a shot in the dark.

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