Grant Shapps: my Michael Green alias was only a 'joke' - Telegraph Politics Grant Shapps: my Michael Green alias was only a 'joke' Grant Shapps, the Conservative Party chairman, has claimed he was only joking when he used a fake name to promote his get-rich-quick business. Mr Shapps on new reports: 'Old story: all properly declared at the time and all many years ago. Labour just hate business' By Rowena Mason , Political Correspondent 6:15PM BST 05 Oct 2012 Comments Mr Shapps is being investigated by the Advertising Standards Agency over his use of an alias, but he last night insisted his real identity was "never a secret" The senior MP said he is "absolutely not embarrassed" about having built a successful business under the name of Michael Green while he was recovering for Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a type of cancer. Hitting back at his critics, Mr Shapps said he only attended an event with a name badge reading "Michael Green" because it was his pseudonym used to write books like How to Get Stinking Rich. "It was a conference joke," he told the Evening Standard. “Everyone knew who I was.

It was not a secret, never was. Authors using pen names is normal. Nigel West is really Rupert Allason [ a former Tory MP and spy writer] and people didn’t care.” Mr Shapps also denied accusations that he bought Twitter followers and said he only ever edited his Wikipedia entry to make it accurate. Related Articles Grant Shapps edited own Wikipedia page 09 Sep 2012 He spoke out to defend himself after Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, mocked the Conservative chairman for his multiple identities. “I’m absolutely not embarrassed about having done something that Ed Miliband has never done – which is to build up a business from scratch,” Mr Shapps told the newspaper. “I know what it’s like to get up early and graft – and to put my house on the line to buy the next printing press, pray it works out, and pay my employees at the end of the week. “It’s easy to make speeches saying ‘I know how difficult it is for working people’. But I have actually been a working person. “Some of us did stuff before we went into politics. Miliband has no other experience at all.

He’s the one who must think he was born to rule because he never went for any other job.” The probe into Mr Shapps is focusing on his claims to be a self-help guru called Michael Green on a website called howtocorp.com. A complaint to the ASA alleges that the website misled the public by presenting Michael Green as a genuine businessman with a personal fortune of £17 million, who would share the secrets of his success for a fee. It relates to a website entitled “Sebastian Fox’s How To Corp – The Home of Great Toolkits on the Net”, which includes links to articles on each advertised “toolkit” which it says are written by Michael Green.

Tory chairman accused of running dirty tricks campaign while minister | The Independent Tory chairman accused of running dirty tricks campaign while minister Cabinet Office refuses to hand over documents relating to altered letter from Lord O'Donnell Sunday 30 September 2012 23:00 BST Click to follow Indy Politics The Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps pictured posing as his alter-ego, Michael Green Grant Shapps has been accused of being at the centre of a "cover-up" over attempts to smear Lord Prescott, after the Cabinet Office refused to release key correspondence from the Tory chairman's former department. While he was housing minister, Mr Shapps repeatedly accused Lord Prescott of having a "cavalier attitude to the public purse", releasing details of bills run up on the former Labour deputy prime minister's departmental credit card. But a letter sent last year by Lord O'Donnell, the then head of the Civil Service, clearing Lord Prescott was substantially altered after contact from Mr Shapps' Department for Communities and Local Government. The Cabinet Office has now blocked Lord Prescott's attempts to get hold of exchanges that led to the alterations, ruling that publication is "not in the public interest".

A month before he resigned as Cabinet Secretary, Lord O'Donnell reviewed the row and wrote to Lord Prescott telling him "the expenditure appears to have been legitimate". However Lord O'Donnell's letter, sent initially on 18 November, was subsequently altered and resent four days later. Claims in the initial letter that "money has been recovered and an individual disciplined", as well as an apology that Lord Prescott was not notified in advance by Mr Shapps of his allegations, were omitted. Lord Prescott told The Independent yesterday that he believed the second letter was sent without the knowledge of Lord O'Donnell, after representations from officials in Mr Shapps' former department. "This is a remarkable government cover-up. Altering letters from the most powerful civil servant in the land without his permission or knowledge is a very, very serious offence," he said. It was an "astounding judgement", he said, that "uncovering who was responsible for this was not in the public interest". Lord Prescott is demanding that the Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, intervenes and forces the Cabinet Office to publish its correspondence with DCLG officials. Aides to Mr Shapps insist they did not contact the Cabinet Office to request that the O'Donnell letter be altered.

The publicity generated by Mr Shapps' accusations, many made under the protection of parliamentary privilege, have damaged Lord Prescott's attempt to win November's election for Humberside's police and crime commissioner. Among the "evidence of excess" were transactions for restaurant bills in Australia, Ireland, Malaysia, the United States and Canada. However, a fraudulently cloned government credit card accounted for £2000 of the bills. In October, Lord Prescott told the Cabinet Office he had never owned a government credit card and accused Mr Shapps of deliberately peddling false accusations as part of an orchestrated "dirty tricks" campaign. The accusations are the latest problem facing Mr Shapps, who was promoted to Tory co-chairman in the autumn reshuffle but has faced questions about his business interests. He has also admitted that he used pseudonyms including "Michael Green" and "Sebastian Fox" in the operation of an online "how to" internet company that he started before he became an MP and which is now run by his wife Belinda.

Following accusations by the Labour MP Steve McCabe that the Tory Party was being run by someone with "multiple personalities and questionable business practices", Mr Shapps told Sky News yesterday that he was not living a "double life" and that like many authors he simply "wrote under a business name". He said he had stopped using the alter-egos "a long time ago". More about: Grant Shapps confronted over ‘Michael Green’ ID in 2012 – Channel 4 News Politics , UK , World Grant Shapps confronted over ‘Michael Green’ ID in 2012 Conservative chairman Grant Shapps admits working as a web marketer under a pseudonym after entering parliament – a claim he denied in 2012. But David Cameron says he has full confidence in Mr Shapps. Share on Twitter Above: Michael Crick doorsteps Grant Shapps on his Michael Green alter-ego and website testimonials in 2012 A recording has emerged from 2006, a year after he was elected, that captures the MP selling business self-help guide Stinking Rich 3 and claiming his products could make listeners a “ton of cash by Christmas”, according to the Guardian .

However, asked about second jobs on LBC last month, Mr Shapps said: “To be absolutely clear, I don’t have a second job and I have never had a second job whilst being an MP. End of story.” But a statement by the Conservatives on Sunday said: “Given that this was a decade ago, and was mentioned during the cut and thrust of an interview, he referenced that his writing career had ended when he became an MP. In fact it ended shortly afterwards.” David Cameron’s official spokesman said on Monday morning that the prime minister had full confidence in Mr Shapps. Labour has called for Prime Minister David Cameron to launch an investigation to “establish all the facts”. ‘Wrote with a pen name’ Mr Shapps used to run the HowToCorp website which featured get-rich-quick advice from supposedly successful businessmen Sebastian Fox and Michael Green – a name the Tory used as a business alias. In the recording, the senior Tory, under the Green pseudonym, told a fellow entrepreneur that the guide “is not a cheap product, but it’s a great internet marketing product”. In a statement a spokesman for the Conservative party said: “Like many authors and journalists, Grant wrote with a pen name.

This was completely transparent: his full name and biographical details were permanently published on the company’s main website. ‘False testimonials’ Asked about second jobs by Channel 4 News in 2012, Mr Shapps said he did not use false testimonials on the get-rich-quick website he ran before entering politics. Mr Shapps said he was co-operating with the Advertising Standards Authority as it investigates a complaint about the HowToCorp website featuring advice from supposedly successful businessmen Sebastian Fox and Michael Green. Green – a name that has been used by Mr Shapps as a business alias – is presented as having built up a $28m (£17m) fortune. The website, which is no longer active, invited users to pay a fee to benefit from his advice. The advertising watchdog has received a complaint suggesting neither Green nor Fox are real people and questioning whether testimonials on the site were really written by satisfied customers. Michael Green Channel 4 News asked Mr Shapps whether a number of testimonials on the site were written by real people and he replied: “Everybody is genuine.

I’m answering the questions for the ASA.” In 2012 Mr Shapps was forced to insist he was not living a double life after pictures emerged of him attending an internet conference shortly before he was elected to parliament, wearing a “Michael Green” name badge. Mr Shapps told Sky News: “Before I went into parliament, I used to write business publications and, like many authors, wrote under a business name. “I was always very open about it and I actually went to one conference, where that picture was from, it was sort of open fact. It was in my biography, it was in the conference programme.” Mr Shapp tweeted on Sunday: “Old story: all properly declared at the time and all many years ago.

Labour just hate business.” Liar, Liar says Grant Shapps / Michael Green - Skibbereen EagleSkibbereen Eagle Home » latest » Politics » Uncategorized » Liar, Liar says Grant Shapps / Michael Green Liar, Liar says Grant Shapps / Michael Green Posted by The Skibbereen Eagle | October 1, 2014 0 Grant Shapps with the unsmiling members of the Tory 1984 committee behind him In his opening speech to the Conservative conference, Mr Shapps said about Mark Recless MP who defected to UKIP on Friday : “I share your deep sense of betrayal and anger. We’ve been repeatedly let down by someone who lied to his constituents and you. He lied, lied and lied again.” Grant Shapps / Michael Green has accused somebody of being a liar. He needs to be listened to as he speaks with real authority on this particular subject. Michael Green, Sebastian Fox and Grant Shapps Internet con-man and Tory Party Chairman Grant Shapps closed down his spam website company following a police investigation which acknowledged that he ‘may’ have committed an act of fraud.

All mention of the Trafficpaymaster software which led to the investigation has been removed from the internet, whilst Shapps’ two alter-egos, Michael Green and Sebastian Fox, have deleted all posts advertising the product on the Warrior Internet Forums. According to The Guardian any allegation of criminal behaviour has been strongly denied with a spokesperson for Shapps saying: “Any suggestion of illegality would be completely improper and malicious and would be treated as such.” Shapps’ company sold software with the express intention of it being used to breach Google’s terms and conditions to generate income from Google ads. The software did this by ‘scraping’ (stealing) content from other people’s websites, spinning it – which means changing a few words round so it looks original – and then using that content to auto-generate websites. Google’s Adsense package could then be added to the websites to make money from advertising. This would mean that small businesses buying advertising through the Google Adsense network – who believed those ads would appear on genuine websites – would be fleeced of their cash. This could be what the police were referring to when they said an act of fraud may have been committed.

The screenshot below shows that the company explicitly advertised their software as a way to ‘build an Adsense empire’. Questions have also been raised about Shapps’ use of pseudonyms and the accuracy of testimonials on his website. After all, if people were recommending this product, and those people didn’t actually exist, then that would be false advertising. Shapps has said his use of the name Michael Green was ‘a joke’. He has not commented on his other alter ego Sebastian Fox. Yet here they both are, plugging his dodgy product, in what seems to be a deliberate attempt to mislead potential customers by having them appear as two different people. In what could be seen as a further attempt to deceive potential buyers, Shapps’ company strongly denied that using this software would lead to websites being blacklisted from the google network – a devastating and quite often fatal consequence for a small online business. Shapps claimed in the Sunday Times that he created Michael Green as a ‘brand name, a bit like Colonel Sanders with his chicken.’ It is unlikely however that KFC’s website is registered under the name Colonel Sanders, unlike Shapps’ company who used the name Michael Green to register trafficpaymaster.com, in direct contravention of US internet rules.

Shapps has done everything he can to hide all traces of his former online activities which also included flogging get rich quick schemes of dubious legality. Unfortunately for him a number of posts made by Sebastian Fox are still available on the Internet Archive and provide more details of exactly what Shapps’ company was up to and how they set out to breach copyright and scam the Google Adsense network. The Tory Conference was overshadowed by the defection of Mr Reckless and the resignation of civil society minister Brooks Newmark over newspaper revelations about his private life. Mr Reckless, who spoke on Saturday of his wish to cut immigration, told BBC One’s Sunday Politics show: “We made all these promises in 2010 as Conservatives and they have been broken. David Cameron has had his chance, he hasn’t kept his promises. I want to keep mine.” Not sure if Grant Shapps under any name has much to say about his internet House of Cards and his ability to make and keep promises. Revealed: BBC-basher Grant Shapps, the new Jeffrey Archer – The Slog.

Date: October 28, 2013 Author: John Ward 28 Comments Grant Shapps…making the Unreal Real The following things about Grant Shapps do not check out: his middle name, his aliases, his education, his business website, his Wikipedia entry, and his Tory Team 2015 website. This man accuses the BBC of falsehoods. But when it comes to falsehoods, only Jeffrey Archer can match him. ‘Grant Shapps, the chairman of the Conservative Party, challenged the corporation to undertake dramatic changes in the wake of a series of scandals and accusations of bias. In a major intervention understood to have been made with the knowledge of Downing Street, he said that the Government would consider whether the BBC can keep receiving all the proceeds of the licence fee – £145.50 each year from every household with a television – after 2016, when its Royal Charter expires.’ Sunday Telegraph Choose who, from these three names, you think will get to inherit at least part of the redistributed licence fee: Rupert Murdoch, Newscorp, or News International. You see, in neolib Cruel Britannia, it’s all about choice.

Talking of names, Labourpress thinks that Grant’s middle name is Disingenuous, but it can’t be because it begins with V. Sorry to be pedantic there Lp, but when it comes to Grant Shapps/Michael Green/Sebastian Fox, it’s important to get the facts right. ………………………………………… Trouble is, nobody seems to know what that middle ‘V’ in Grant’s monniker stands for. When signing on as a candidate for election as MP in 2000, he still signed ‘V’, despite being required to give his full name. So it must stand for nothing, mustn’t it? Or else that would make Mr Shapps a liar. Wouldn’t it? And as it happens, Grant’s birth was registered with NO middle name: not V or D or Z or X. It’s all a bit odd. But then, the life of Grant Shapps has the word ‘odd’ running through it like the letters in a stick of rock. As one digs into the hastily buried life history of Grant Shapps, it’s hard to escape the sense of a bloke who has always felt the need for deceit in order to get on.

But lest anyone should think otherwise, his life has been far from easy. He suffered serious lymphatic cancer at a young age, and at the even younger age of 20 was involved in a US car crash that left him in a coma. He is also educationally challenged, and suffers regular memory lapses. For example, he went to Watford Grammar, but can’t remember what GCSE grades he got. However, some indication of what they might have been (if he got any) is betrayed by his Wikipedia entry which says he went to ‘Cassio College’. Many people might assume this to have been an Oxbridge institution, but it isn’t: these days, it’s known as West Herts College, which ‘works with local secondary schools to offer entry to applicants of 14 years of age and older. Some school pupils may transfer their full-time education to the College in order to restart their education or to take some vocational subjects at Level 1…..A few GCSE subjects are offered to gifted pupils.’ Gifted? When talking of his educational under-achievement, Shapps uses words like ‘read’ and ‘studied’ to suggest a University degree in the mix.

But there isn’t one: Grant flunked his exams….and then went to the kind of crammer Michael Gove thinks to be a jolly good money-spinning scam basis for further education in the UK. Anyway, it didn’t work, because all Mr Shapps managed was an HND in business studies at Manchester Poly. An HND is the sort of thing with which the dimmer secretary used to emerge from education. Under pressure, he has admitted that he left school at sixteen, and left Manchester Poly without completing the Degree Course after two years. Is it me, or do others feel that this deceit seems uncomfortably close to another Tory Chairman, one Jeffrey Archer? Anyway, not being Brain of Britain – it’s hardly surprising that, when he set about making his fortune by writing self-help books (and if anyone needs help, then the Tory Chairman does) Shapps felt it necessary to use a nom de plume on his website. But how many noms de plume does a chap need…unless of course he has other motives? In his Wikipedia entry, Shapps is quoted as saying that he used a pseudonym to keep his business separate from his future political work. A man who can see into the future?

My God, this is just what Britain needs. The only problem for Grant is that this is total bollocks. He didn’t just use one pseudonym – Michael Green – but also another one, Sebastian Fox. And he used them to big himself up: the man now doffed a Rt. Hon. Privy Councillor misled the public by implying that “Sebastian Fox” or “Michael Green” were real people, and that the glowing testimonies they attracted were genuine. Michael Green was depicted by Shapps as a successful businessman with a personal fortune of £17 million who could make customers “$20,000 in 20 days”. The entire thing was a Kleenex man-sized tissue of lies. In 2012, a formal complaint about these fraudulent whoppers was made to the marketing publicity watchdog, the ASA. Now, read the right wing press and you will be told that the complaint “came to nothing”. You will see the inestimably ethics-free Quentin Letts tipping Shapps as ‘a future Conservative leader’.

But this too is a lie: the How To Corp run by Shapps at the time was forced to make a grovelling apology to the ASA: a year ago this month, the Evening Standard reported an ASA statement as follows: ‘”We have resolved the matter informally with How To Corp. We have received assurances that the marketer will in future make clear if pseudonyms are used and that they will not use testimonials in the absence of adequate evidence.“ We need to get this straight: there was NO evidence – none whatsoever – for the existence of either Michael Green or Sebastian Fox. Grant Shapps made them up to sell product in a deliberately misleading manner. He is an internet scam-artist; and he is Chairman of the Conservative Party. But surely we should forgive this one-off momentary lapse? For is Grant not the accelerating leopard who will rush the Conservatives to outright victory? Maybe. But leopards never change their spots. In April this year, Shapps was at it again. And this time, he could hardly blame a biased BBC or New Statesman or Guardian for “manufacturing” a case against him. This time it was the Mail showing him up as the dissembling cheat he’s always been.

The website produced by Grant’s ‘Team 2015’ wheeze was desperately trying to give the Tory Party a clean-cut, youthful look. But they couldn’t find any Young Conservatives like that, so the website used stock shots of Aussie students. ‘Make It Happen’ says the slogan – alongside a message from the real Grant Shapps – and so Grant made it happen. It’s just that very little he makes (or claims) turns out to be real. The previous year, it transpired that a ’hard working family’ used in Tory ads approved by Shapps had also been pictured promoting insurance brokers, builders and dentists in lots of other countries across the globe. Clearly, that particular family had been working very hard indeed. ………………………………… This is the man who now challenges the BBC to clean up its act ‘in the wake of a series of scandals and accusations of bias’. Laugh? I nearly paid me licence fee. Here are some behavioural clues as to why Mr Shapps wants the BBC to be a business lapdog. He wants more transparency in the BBC, but has never voted for more transparency in Parliament. He thinks the BBC should be more representative, but he has always voted strongly against proportional representation to elect MPs.

He thinks the BBC should give better value for money, but he voted very strongly to increase the Student fees to £9,000 a year. He thinks the BBC should do more for its licence fee, but as an MP he hasn’t made a single speech during the last year. Know why? Because spinning bollocks to get the Conservatives reelected is a 24/7 job, and he doesn’t care about anything else. And that means what he really needs is a compliant BBC doing as its told. Just like it did when that nice Alistair Campbell and his chum Tony Blair were lying to Parliament and the media about the Saddam weapons dossier. Grant Shapps is merely another junior member of the Dowhateverittakes wing of the Conservative Party. But he is becoming senior at a rate of knots. We shouldn’t find anything unusual or unpredictable in Shapps’s promotion to the highest office. His profile fits like a glove with those of many other spivs among the Camerlot Big Beasts.

Hunt’s monopoly selling to the corrupt British Council and falsified accolade as ‘the best course information supplier in London’; Johnson the thug who agreed to beat up an opponent of the fraudster Darius Guppy, who made police-corrupter Murdoch the guest of honour at the 2012 Olympics, and who bent the results on London taxi emissions to help his equally corrupt chum Tim Yeo; Fallon the senior director of the biggest Libor broker who apparently didn’t know anything about rate manipulation. The list goes on and on. Quite how the man who castigated City spivs more than anyone – Vince Cable – can hold his head up while remaining in this den of thieves both baffles and disappoints me. But equally predictable is that a chancer like Shapps should be given the go-ahead by Downing Street to start moving the goalposts closer together for the BBC….and wider and wider apart for Murdoch’s goal-poachers. It started with the shifting of Cable sideways and harmless, and then the scandalous bias displayed by Hunt during the BSkyB enquiry.

When Murdoch and his gangsters were shown to have lied from Day One about phone hacking, enter the mass distraction away from Newscorp with a full frontal attack on the BBC by McAlpine, labelling the Beeb a house of grooming monsters, while neatly at one and the same time putting real systemic and family paedophilia back into the murky shadows. We all have our feelings about the Beeb, but you can see what’s happening here: Coulson and Brooks go to trial (cue waves of warnings about press reporting restrictions). Hopefully Cameron comes out badly, in comes the former Murdoch employee Gove to replace him, and then in time onto the airwaves goes a Newscorp controlled “business friendly” Channel lauding the virtues of every twister in the City and Westminster….with the Beeb increasingly vulnerable to attack from every truth-censoring sociopath in Parliament, banking and business. As I have written before, we are witnessing the privatisation of politics , and the Labour Party is far from innocent in the process. Their MPs too have acquiesced in the formalisation of democracy’s death by deranged, badhat capitalism.

As Shapps himself told Total Politics at the start of the year, “Cards on the table, I don’t think there are enough people with serious business backgrounds in Parliament and, as a result, it’s too easy for governments to do things that aren’t business-friendly”. Coming from a serially mendacious internet lightweight, that is rich fare indeed. But then, “business friendly” has become one of these terms like “Final Solution”: a disgusting euphemism for evil on an industrial scale. It means, for example, not arresting guilty media moguls despite damning audio evidence, or senior investment bankers, or deputy BoE Governors, or paedophile former Cabinet Ministers, or Plymouth MPs, bent taxi suppliers, report-burying former Home Secretaries, EU Commissioners, privatised rail directors, multinational tax-evaders, and so forth. You know….showing the world we’re open for business. I prefer the term open to question. Everything about Grant Shapps is questionable. So rebut the evidence of this post Mr Shapps….or sue and be damned. But in the meantime, do us all a favour and shut up about the BBC.

Grant Shapps: 5 things you need to know about the Tory Chairman's online business - Mirror Online News Grant Shapps: 5 things you need to know about the Tory Chairman's online business Conservative minister and chairman Grant Shapps - also known as Michael Green - has a colourful history of online activities. Here's a roundup Share Grant Shapps: AKA Michael Green. AKA Sebastian Fox? (Photo: PA) Share Get politics updates directly to your inbox + Subscribe Thank you for subscribing! Could not subscribe, try again laterInvalid Email Tory party chairman Grant Shapps faced calls for his resignation this morning, after admitting he "screwed up" with a boast that he'd never had a second job since becoming an MP. Before becoming an MP, Shapps founded HowToCorp, a web marketing firm offering books on how to get "stinking rich" in a very short time. These books were written by Shapps under the pen-name Michael Green. Shapps previously said he stopped using the identity of Michael Green when he became an MP in 2005, but today's revelations show he was still using the name until at least the following year.

And that's not the only unusual part of the fascinating story of Grant Shapps online marketing career. Here's everything you need to know about Grant Shapps, Michael Green and HowToCorp. Video Loading Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8Cancel Play now Watch Next 1. Michael Green may not be his only alter ego - meet Sebastian Fox As well as using the pen-name Michael Green when writing his online 'get rich quick' books, his business website bore the title "Sebastian Fox's HowToCorp." There is no evidence that Sebastian Fox is an actual person. The only registered directors of HowToCorp were Shapps, his wife Belinda and an accountant and company secretary - neither of whom were called Sebastian Fox. There was a person who posted HowToCorp's support forum (now sadly deleted from the internet) under the name SebFox - and was doing so as recently as 2012, according to a letter from Labour MP Steve McCabe to a civil servant. SebFox signed off some posts using the name Michael Green. 2.

His lawyers demanded that someone on Facebook apologise for a post about his use of a pseudonym In November he instructed lawyers to force a constituent and former Labour councillor to replace a Facebook post about his use of a ­pseudonym with an apology that explicitly states he was not using Green when he was an MP. The Guardian reported lawyers said it must read: “ Mr Shapps MP has at no time misled over the use of a pen name. "I now understand that he openly published his full name alongside business ­publications making it clear he used a pen name merely to ­separate business and politics, prior to entering ­parliament.” 3. His company was investigated by the advertising watchdog The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) was brought in to investigate claims that HowToCorp misleadingly implied Michael Green was a real person, and that testimonials on the site were not genuine.

The investigation was "resolved informally", after HowToCorp gave assurances that in future it would make it clear if pseudonyms were used, and they would not "use testimonials in the absence of adequate evidence." The row over the testimonials also resulted in one of the funniest moments in the history of Channel 4 News, when Michael Crick chased Mr Shapps around the Tory Party conference asking him if the testimonials were real people. Video Loading 4. Grant Shapps has had some really odd Twitter habits Grant Shapps has more Twitter followers than most MPs - almost 84,000 at last count. But for a long time he had a curious habit of following and unfollowing people - seemingly at random, and often repeatedly. Look: At the hight of this odd behaviour according to research carried out by political marketing company Yatterbox, Shapps was following as many as 5,000 people then unfollowing them if they didn't follow him back.

Matt Freckleton, managing director of Yatterbox told the Guardian: "After doing some research we were able to compile some graphs which suggest that Grant Shapps – or someone with access to Grant's Twitter account – is regularly and purposely following and unfollowing many thousands of people on Twitter. It is quite normal for anybody to unfollow people on Twitter, but when it is done in such large numbers on such a frequent basis it does raise questions as to what is going on and why." 5. He's got a lot of 'fake' Twitter followers Our friends at Ampp3d carried out some research on the number of 'fake' followers various British MPs have. Web tool TwitterAudit works out the likelihood of a follower being fake based on the number of tweets they've sent, the date of their last tweet and their ratio of followers to friends. He placed third on the list, with 19% of his followers appearing to be fake - almost 13,000 of them. Ahead of him on the list were former Foreign Secretary William Hague and Tory MP Nadine Dorries. Dorries took to Twitter this morning to defend Shapps, comparing him (oddly) to JK Rowling.

Like us on Facebook The troubled career of Tory high-flier Grant Shapps hits another obstacle over bullying claims - Telegraph Conservative The troubled career of Tory high-flier Grant Shapps hits another obstacle over bullying claims Following Grant Shapps's resignation from government in wake of revelations he was warned about 'Tatler Tory' bullying in the party, Patrick Sawer looks at his rise and fall Grant Shapps Photo: LNP 5:46PM GMT 28 Nov 2015 Grant Shapps must be getting used to this. Just six months ago he was sacked from the cabinet, which he had attended as party co-chairman and minister without portfolio at the Cabinet Office. Instead Mr Shapps was moved to the Department for International Development as minister of state, after a series of embarrassing claims about his attempts to mould his public image on social media. It was widely regarded as a “humiliating blow” for someone who – in his own mind at least – had been a Tory rising star. But it was far from being the first time Mr Shapps had been on the receiving end of negative headlines.

Minister Grant Shapps resigns over 'Tatler Tory' Mark Clarke bullying scandal Lord Andrew Feldman and Grant Shapps Photo: Alan Davidson In May 2008 he was named as one of several opposition front bench spokesmen who had received donations from firms linked to their shadow ministerial portfolios. Shapps, then the party’s housing spokesman, disclosed to the Parliamentary Commissioner that he had taken tens of thousands of pounds from five different companies associated with his portfolio. The Conservative party said shadow ministers had not been influenced by donations and the Commissioner exonerated all shadow cabinet members involved. Fours later Mr Shapps ran into trouble of his use of the pen names Michael Green and Sebastian Fox. He denied having used the pseudonyms after entering Parliament and in 2014 he threatened legal action against a constituent who had stated on Facebook that he had. However, in March 2015, Mr Shapps admitted in his early years as an MP he had in fact used the pseudonym Michael Green to front his second job as a “multimillion-dollar web marketer”. The nature of the web marketing business was also criticised, after it was revealed it bore many similarities to a pyramid selling scheme.

It promised investors they could make $20,000 in 20 days by creating their own online guide to sell to others and recruiting one hundred 'Joint Venture partners’ to sell the product on to. Tories 'failed to act' on claims of assault and harassment David Cameron (left) with Grant Shapps Photo: PA Over the past few years Mr Shapps has been dogged by allegations that he edited his own Wikipedia page to remove unflattering material. In 2012 it was reported that his Wikipedia article had been edited from his office to remove embarrassing information and correct an error. Mr Shapps said he only edited the biography to make it more accurate. But during the 2015 general election campaign a Wikipedia administrator claimed that Mr Shapps had used a 'sock puppet’ account to remove embarrassing material from his own Wikipedia page and make “largely unflattering” edits to articles about other politicians, including some in his own party. Mr Shapps denied the allegations and it was claimed his accuser was a “Liberal Democrat activist”. Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee found there was “no significant evidence” to link the Contribsx account to Mr Shapps and Wikipedia censured the administrator responsible for the allegation.

Born in Watford, Shapps – a cousin of Mick Jones, the guitarist of pioneering punk band The Clash – attended the town’s grammar school for boys and went on to Manchester Polytechnic, now Manchester Metropolitan University, where he took a diploma in business finance. While travelling through the US at the age of 20, in 1989, he was involved in a car crash that left him in a coma for several days. After being discharged from hospital in Wichita he recuperated at a Ronald McDonald home, a children’s care facility sponsored by the burger giant. In 1999 Mr Shapps was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy. As a result of the effects of chemotherapy, his children, from his wife Belinda Goldstone, were conceived by IVF. Mr Shapps was elected to Parliament in 2005 as MP for Welwyn Hatfield, with the second highest swing from Labour. In 2010 he became housing minister and promptly ended automatic lifetime social tenancies and promoted plans for flexible rent – measures that were criticised for targeting poorer tenants.

Grant Shapps with Delegates Including Mark Clarke and Elliot Johnson (circled) Photo: Ray Tang/REX Shutterstock On becoming Tory party chairman in 2012 Mr Shapps hired the controversial Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby to strengthen the Conservative’s campaign in the run-up to the 2015 general election. Described as energetically enthusiastic, with all the manner of a Labrador puppy, there is also something of the pit bull terrier about Mr Shapps. An enthusiastic amateur pilot, he flew to attend a recording of Radio 4’s Any Questions in 2010 and, under the pseudonym Michael Green, boasted of his “two aircraft”. Two years ago he objected to plans to build 700 homes on the airfield where he kept his £100,000 Piper Saratoga light aircraft, describing the site as a “community asset that can never be replaced”. As Michael Green he boasted of his entrepreneurial success, stating on an online marketing news site: “In 'Stinking Rich 3′ I go way beyond the regular marketing hype to reveal your secret path to online success.” Whether or not he bounces back from his latest setback remains to be seen. One thing is for certain.

Mr Shapps’s Wikipedia entry needs editing. Grant Shapps | the void Posted on March 16, 2015 by johnny void | 38 comments Tory chairperson Grant Shapps has claimed that he got his dates mixed up after a recording of him pretending to be Michael Green in 2006 was uncovered by The Guardian. Shapps had claimed he left the internet con-man business behind when he was elected as an MP in 2005. The recording clearly proves this was a lie. In fact his trafficpaymaster website is still registered in the US to Michael Green . This is a breach of contract with ICANN who oversee internet domains in the US. Were the website to have been used for any dubious purposes – such as encouraging people to rip off the small businesses using google ads by flooding the net with fake websites – then this false registration would be an aggravating factor which could lead to an additional seven years in jail. All of Michael Green’s websites have vanished and even been blocked from the internet archive project . So there is no way of knowing for sure whether the Conservative Party were telling the truth when they said yesterday that: “his full name and biographical details were permanently published on the company’s main website”.

It seems strange to go to the trouble of using a fake name to register the website if this was the case. There is no mention of Grant Shapps on any of the screenshots that scores of people managed to take of the sites before they disappeared. Michael Green was also a regular contributor to the Warrior internet forums, alongside Sebastian Fox, another pseudonym used by his former company howtocorp.com. Most of these posts have been deleted as well , although a few still remain in which both of these non-existent people appear together . Grant Shapps never mentioned his real identity there either. Another website which has gone missing is trafficpaymaster.wordpress.com . This site was removed from wordpress for violating their terms and conditions. It only contained one post, made in July 2011 by someone calling themselves John Hilton, a ‘self-proclaimed’ internet marketing expert. This post gave a suspiciously glowing review of the software that Grant Shapps’ company sold alongside handy details of where to purchase it. The only links on the site point to the websites that Shapps used to run and the previously mentioned Warrior internet forums. Because it was hosted on wordpress.com it cannot be hidden from the internet archive. Fake reviews are likely to be illegal under consumer protection laws.

Whether John Hilton is also Grant Shapps, or his wife who he claimed took over the company, remains yet another mystery in the murky former world of the Conservative Party Chairman. Shapps has repeatedly claimed he is the victim of political smears. Judge for yourself. This blog has no sources of funding so here’s a quick reminder that you can help ensure it continues by making a donation. Join me on facebook or follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid

Question: Which Conservative politician has used the pseudonyms Michael Green and Sebastian Fox in his business life ?
Answer: GRANT SHAPPS