In January 2011, as a lone security guard sat idly watching television in a small portakabin, a group of urban explorers known as the ‘London Consolidation Crew’ quietly slipped, undetected, into what was generally considered to be one of the most secure sites in the capital: The Shard.
Although still under construction at the time, the imposing structure still towered 72 storeys into the London sky. And so, having circumvented the site’s only uniformed deterrent, the fearless adventurers of the LCC began their ascent. Working their way up through the building’s many levels, amid bare concrete floors, exposed girders, and the clutter of construction paraphernalia, they eventually reached the top floor, where the brisk winter air swirled and gusted against their clammy faces.
As a reward for their efforts, the crew were able to take some amazing night-time aerial shots of London, which they later posted on their Placehacking blog. But curiously, not until 14 months after the event.
At the time, I read a fantastically detailed photography blog about the group’s Shard exploits, which forensically examined the images and accompanying story. When exactly did the trespass happen? Is the Shard site really only protected by one ineffectual guard? How did they pull off those pin-sharp long exposures in such blustery conditions? And most importantly, why had the group sat on such a great story for so long?
As it all seemed a little too good to be true, with a few niggling inconsistencies, the group’s exploits simply had to be examined more closely. Did it all check out, or were we being hoodwinked? It was a case of “Great story! But I have some questions…”
I thought about this the other day – the importance of questioning everything – when Otto English tweeted a photo of some ‘March to Leave’ campaigners, asking: “Who are these people who seem to be a Mitford sisters tribute act? They keep popping up.”
I was immediately intrigued as to who the women were and why they had seemingly become the faces of the Leave campaign. So I went into Bellingcat-lite mode and spent a week wading through what I could find online to see if I could discover a bit more about them. I had questions….lots of questions.
Alice Grant (@missalicegrant)
Alice’s Twitter account was activated in August 2013, yet her first tweets didn’t appear till 10 April 2016, which consisted of a “selfie with Pickle” (her cat) and a photo of the Trevi Fountain in Rome. She then didn’t tweet a single thing for over 11 months; nothing about the EU referendum or its outcome – nothing.
Following this almost immediate hiatus, she popped up again in early 2017 to post just two tweets: a photo of Pink Floyd from 1967 and a photo of Syd Barret. She then disappeared again for another 11 months.
Between February and September 2018, she mainly retweeted nothing but cats and The Beatles (with Pingu and a video of some flamingos thrown in for good measure). Her account wasn’t the slightest bit political. Then, quite suddenly, on 20 November 2018, she retweeted a video of Jacob Rees-Mogg talking about how the government was aiming to frustrate Brexit – and the floodgates just opened. Actually, “floodgate” is too kind. Imagine someone blowing a hole in the side of a 4,500-litre septic tank.
Since that time, she’s retweeted the likes of Nigel Farage, Gerard Batten, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Guido Fawkes (talking about “the remainstream media”), the DUP’s Sammy “go to the chippy” Wilson, and everyone’s favourite working-class breaker of electoral law: Darren Grimes.
It’s a bizarre 0-100mph transformation from infrequent, inconsequential tweeter to hardcore pro-Leave mouthpiece. And what’s perhaps more surprising, given the bot-like nature of her Twitter account, is that she’s actually flesh and blood. She attended the Leave Means Leave rally at London’s Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre on 14 December 2018 with her mum, Lydia Grant, and 15-year-old sister Beatrice, where she had her photo taken with Nigel Farage (and was also featured prominently in a Mail Online article about the event). And since January, she’s also been regularly protesting outside Parliament.
The family were mentioned in a La Croix article in January, which quoted their father, Matthew Grant, as saying: “The country will probably suffer during the first years after Brexit” – but we will adapt and “everything will be fine”. (For some, maybe.)
On 8 January 2019, Sherelle Jacobs (Assistant Comment Editor at the Daily Telegraph) posted a photo of Alice and her mum holding up their placards – plucked from the protests completely at random, I’m sure – where she noted that Alice is a “17-year-old from London who is studying A-level politics”. Of course, this makes the distinct lack of political content on her Twitter account pre-November 2018 even more curious. Also, judging by her pro-Leave tweets, it’s entirely possible that she’s being taught A-Level politics by Roger Daltrey.
On 14 January, she was interviewed in a Deutsche Welle News report about the Remain/Leave protests outside of Parliament, in which she affirmed: “We can definitely survive a no deal.” When the journalist reminded her that almost every economic model showed that the UK’s GDP would go down, and asked if that was a price worth paying, she provided a typically woolly response: “Yeah! We’re the British people. I think we can do it…and Britain’s a strong country…and I think we can definitely survive.”
As her stirring rallying cry fizzled out into a desperately uncomfortable rictus smile, the camera then panned to her mum, who, with a Govian distrust of experts, added: “Economists are usually wrong, you know. They’re not always right. They always say things which are not right, and maybe this time they’re wrong as well.”
So, to recap: we can survive a no-deal Brexit because “we’re the British people” (immune, as we are, to economic shock and potential food and medicine shortages), and “economists are usually wrong”. So, hey! Let’s turn our frowns into big fucking smiles!
Generally, the pro-Leave content that Alice posts almost always features photos and videos of her and her family protesting outside Parliament with the likes of Belinda de Lucy McKeeve (more on her later) and Alison Sheridan (‘Leave Means Leave’ campaigner and UKIP chairman for Exeter).
They pop up absolutely everywhere. Three seconds into a BBC news report with Tory MP Owen Paterson claiming that the threat of ‘no deal’ has been overplayed – THERE THEY ARE! A cutaway of Alice and her mum holding “Believe in Britain” and “No Deal? No Problem!” placards. Three seconds into another BBC News clip – THERE THEY ARE AGAIN!! Alice and Beatrice standing shoulder to shoulder with Harry Todd, Leave Means Leave’s national ground campaign co-ordinator, as they join him in a less than rousing chant of “Leave Means Leave!”.
On 4 February Alice tweeted: “It is indeed SHAMEFUL that the BBC broadcasted the speech by the extremist and EU supra-nationalist Verhofstadt, and not of our Nigel, who valiantly stood up for our country against those EU fanatics.” Sick-inducing reference to “our Nigel” aside, referring to Verhofstadt as an “extremist” and his EU colleagues as “fanatics” when she follows the likes of Gerard Batten, Marine Le Pen and a ‘Tommy Robinson for PM’ Twitter account is quite something. In fact, she quote-tweeted Marine Le Pen in February, saying “Spot on!”.
On 12 March, Alice tweeted that we should start “deselecting the anti-democratic traitors who insult the British people by placing the EU organisation above our country’s future of freedom and prosperity”. The distance travelled between Pickle the cat and her furious talk of traitors is incalculable.
On 13 March, Alice tweeted two photos of herself posing in a short skirt, holding a Union Flag in one hand and a “Let’s Go WTO!” placard in the other. Using the #MarchToLeave hashtag, she said that she would see everyone in Sunderland on Saturday 16 March. Her photos (a smiley, carefree, head tilt shot and a ‘looking over the shoulder, hand on hip’ arse shot) had a whiff of Instagram influencer about them. Instead of the placard, she could just as easily been holding a pack of limited edition Choco Leibniz, or a new brand of filter coffee, or a Charlie Dimmock-endorsed multi-purpose garden rake. But it was ‘no deal’ Brexit that was being sold instead.
https://twitter.com/missalicegrant/status/1105948026663772160
Following the first leg of the March to Leave – full of soggy smiles and rain-sodden snaps with Catherine Blaiklock (shortly before she resigned as leader of the Brexit party) – Alice and Beatrice were subsequently featured in lead photos in The Times, The Sunday Telegraph and The Mail Online. (The Telegraph has used Alice as the lead photo on several Brexit-related articles – here, here and here. They can’t get enough of her!) The girls even made it into Peter Hitchens’ column. In a piece entitled ‘The mystery of the glamorous Brexiteers’, Hitchens bemoaned “the almost total absence of glamorous young women” at protest events over the years. Until, that is, he came across a picture of the Grant sisters; two “unusually attractive females” demonstrating in favour of leaving the EU. Alice tweeted her thanks to Hitchens, who, in response, snidely enquired: “Do you do a lot of demonstrating?”
Alice also appeared in a Guardian video of the Sunderland march, in which she said: “I’ve come because I believe in Brexit and I believe in leaving the EU at whatever cost, including on WTO terms.”
AT WHATEVER COST!!
Writing in The Spectator about the March to Leave – as the dreary column of cunts trudged towards London – Nigel Farage name-checked the Grant sisters and curiously blew a large proportion of his word count addressing accusations that they’re hired help.
‘Pints and pretty girls: my week with the March to Leave’, Nigel Farage in The Spectator (30 March 2019)
A week into the event, as we walked from Mansfield, I was delighted to chat to the Grant sisters, Bea and Alice. They are first-time voters and committed Brexiteers. To the horror of many, they also happen to be bright, pretty girls. Yes, intelligent young women do support Brexit. The Remain side don’t have complete ownership of Britain’s youth. Journalists have been trying to find out more about their identity. There have been claims made that these girls are hired Russian models, that they’re ringers, only turning up at Leave events because someone is paying them. Though flattering, the truth is far more prosaic. They are just ordinary young women excited by the prospect of a free UK. They are an inspiration to me; it’s their future that I’m working for.
It’s true to say, of course, that Alice and Beatrice certainly will be first-time voters…when they’re old enough to vote. But it was interesting to note Farage’s keenness to stress that the Leave campaign isn’t just puce old men (and Mark Francois) dribbling on about the war – they have young people, too! Also, framing his meeting with the sisters as a chance encounter on the Mansfield leg of the march belies the fact that he met Alice at a Leave Means Leave rally as far back as December 2018. The sisters were also among several young people used as set dressing at another Leave Means Leave rally in January 2019.
Most recently, Alice tweeted that the People’s Vote March in London was “a sick display of hatred & bigotry towards the 17.4m people who voted to be an independent, self-governing, democratic nation”. She also claimed that the 52%/48% referendum victory for the Leave campaign was “the largest democratic mandate in our history”. Even ‘our Nigel’ said that a result with that kind of narrow winning margin would be “unfinished business”!
On the same day she was chatting shit about the People’s March, she was also being pursued on Twitter by a freelance journalist who wanted to get her on Stephen Nolan’s BBC Radio 5 live show to talk about Brexit. The fact that Alice has gone from complete anonymity to becoming a media starlet in just a few months is as baffling as it is suspicious.
Beatrice Grant (@BeatriceGrant_)
Beatrice fired up her Twitter account in January 2019, claiming to be a “proud leave supporter campaigning for democracy and freedom”. She was front and centre in Esther McVey’s excruciating Ladies for Leave video, which included a slightly awkward moment when McVey turned towards Beatrice when reaffirming that they all knew what they’d voted for (she’s too young to vote). Of course, that didn’t stop Beatrice and her mum doing individual pieces to camera, stating the reasons why Britain should leave the EU.
Perhaps the weirdest thing to happen during her short time on Twitter was when journalist Peter Jukes tweeted a photo of Alice and Beatrice in The Times and accused them of being paid models to bump up numbers on Farage’s sparsely attended March to Leave. In response, perma-tanned slug Andy Wigmore claimed: “Actually, it’s the daughter of one of our leaders.“
The following day Beatrice publicly refuted Wigmore’s claim, saying: “Who are you Andy? I’m not related to any leader of the Leave Means Leave campaign. I’m so disappointed by your lies.” He neither deleted the tweet nor retracted the claim – it was a most bizarre interaction.
Alexander Feltham (@AlexFeltham_)
Like Beatrice, Alexander Feltham’s Twitter account didn’t pop up till January 2019. He’s a Wykehamist and a friend of Alice and Beatrice, who acts like a sort of praetorian guard, tackling any detractors who accuse the sisters of being on the Leave Means Leave payroll. Interesting factoid: he follows the Wurzels’ official Twitter account.
Belinda de Lucy McKeeve (@BrexitBetrayal)
In June 2016, a little under two weeks before the EU Referendum, Belinda de Lucy McKeeve was attending the Cartier Queen’s Cup at the Guard’s Polo Club with Lady Kitty Spencer. Just over a week ago, she was hanging out with rank-and-file Brexiteers at Worksop Royal Legion. She used to run the Brexit Betrayal Twitter account (until she recently deleted it when she became a Brexit Party candidate for the South East) and believes there’s a globalist plot to stop Brexit. It’s quite a turnaround. But like Alice and Beatrice, she’s another one of the pro-Leave cabal who’s swiftly risen to prominence within the Leave Means Leave campaign. But something doesn’t quite add up about her story either.
She’s married to Raymond McKeeve, a “leading private equity specialist” and corporate finance partner at Jones Day, and is a trustee for Give Them Time, a charity founded by the disgraced former defence secretary and arch Brexiteer, Dr Liam Fox. However, Belinda’s wealthy background and high-profile connections are often eschewed in favour of the simple “mum of four” label whenever she’s on Leave Means Leave duty. And sometimes she uses a different name entirely.
On 15 January she was interviewed on Spiegel TV and also featured in an Evening Standard article about the Brexit protests at Westminster, where she went by the name Belinda Camborne. In fairness, it’s not like she was operating under the moniker Sophronia Fakename – and public records show her full name to be Belinda Claire De Camborne Lucy – but it feels like she made a conscious decision to drop elements of her name that made her sound overtly posh and unrelatable. Of course, it may have been an innocent Trumpian effort to save time and words.
On 12 February, she was invited onto Jeremy Vine’s BBC2 radio show to talk about the Westminster protests, along with Polly Ernest from the Stand of Defiance European Movement (SODEM). According to Vine, they were chosen as guests because they were both grassroots activists in their mid-40s and had children. But I find it odd that Belinda and the Grant sisters have been getting so much media exposure. Why them? Why now? They’re all clearly wealthy people who will undoubtedly be insulated from the fallout of a no-deal Brexit, so the question is: how will they benefit and prosper from it?
Don’t get me wrong, wealthy people can be passionate about making a fortune campaigning for important causes just like the rest of us. But the cynic in me simply doesn’t believe that there’s a benevolent reason for their sudden interest in heavily promoting a no-deal Brexit.
Incidentally, my favourite photo of the Grant family shows their mum holding a “No Deal? No Problem!” sign in one hand and a Fortnum & Mason bag in the other. We’re all in this together, right?
Well, that’s what they would have us believe.
Oh, and the ‘London Consolidation Crew’ sat on their Shard story for over a year because they wanted to return to the site a few more times and knew that going public too early with their story would see security arrangements significantly beefed up. Their story checked out. Not too sure about this bunch, though.
Sublime clip-clops 
Yeah, I’d been wondering about them as well, after noticing the same girl over and over in Leave march propaganda. Here’s one you missed: her old blog – https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WgrPTVdT33cJ:https://missaliceblog.weebly.com/
Not much left of it there, but curiously enough, not a single mention of anything political, a different (deleted) Instagram account, an emptied YouTube channel, and a totally different writing style.
Nothing fishy about any of this though, oh no.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Alice tweeted this a couple of days ago, which makes me suspect that someone else simply must be managing her Twitter account. The language of this tweet just doesn’t match up with her woolliness in the Deutsche Welle News report. And, like you say, it’s a different tone to her “LOL” style of writing in her blog.
As an aside, I also notice from looking at Alice and Beatrice’s Twitter accounts that they both follow Joel Chilaka, Sussex University’s “Turning Point Influencer”. Belinda de Lucy McKeeve’s ‘Brexit Betrayal’ Twitter account follows Turning Point UK and also several of its influencers: Dominique Samuels, Tom Harwood, Darren Grimes, and TPUK Chairman (and former Bullingdon Club member) George Farmer.
During its UK launch, Turning Point tweeted: “The Left believes they have a monopoly over young people. It’s time us young people fought back. We are so excited to announce the social media launch of TPUK, which will be launching across UK [university] campuses soon.” (Jacob Rees-Mogg also tweeted his support for the organisation following its launch.) It makes me wonder if TPUK might have a hand in this sudden influx of young people pushing for ‘no deal’ WTO Brexit. Is it an attempt to make right wing lunacy enticing? Is it a recruitment exercise?
When Nigel Farage arrived for the ‘Brexit Betrayal Bash’ at Millbank Tower on 29 March, TPUK influencer Dominique Samuels was in his orbit. In early March, she was interviewed by The Express and said it was time for Theresa May to pursue a ‘no deal’ Brexit – just like the Grant sisters.
Finally, I notice that Alice is now following the Twitter account of François Asselineau and his Union Populaire Républicaine party, which (according to a quick Google) promotes France’s unilateral withdrawal from the European Union, the Eurozone and NATO. Interesting to see that she’s not just passionate about the UK leaving the EU, but about other countries leaving too. It feels like there’s a bigger agenda here – bigger than the Grant sisters. They’re just being used in whatever dark goings on are afoot.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Encountered them at Sodem. I find the whole ‘Our Nigel’ thing very creepy and nauseating. Humbert Humbert? Fawning on two schoolgirls who dress like out-takes of St Trinians is NOT a good look, however you judge it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I actually think they’re trying to appeal to planks like this. I’m more affronted by the “our Nigel” reference because it suggests he’s a man valiantly fighting for Britain against EU tyranny. A man protecting British values. But truth is, he’s a racist arsehole who stands only for self-preservation and personal enrichment. He’s not fighting for me.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Brilliant piece and I’d also like to point something else out .
One early morning at SODEM three of us were chatting in the Yard holding flags.
A man came up to us and asked ‘are you with Nigel Farage?’
‘No’ we responded aghast ‘we are remainers’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked ‘you are the women Nigel Farage said would be here ‘
He pulled a printed email out of his pocket. I didn’t look too closely but it was from LML and it had a picture on it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Polly! Very interesting to hear of your encounter with the man with the printed LML e-mail. There’s clearly been a very coordinated effort to get the Grant sisters and Belinda de Lucy McKeeve in front of the cameras at every possible opportunity. It’s difficult not to find it all a bit suspicious when the same faces are popping up time and time again. BDLM was even on the Victoria Derbyshire show on 29 March, wearing a hi-vis vest to reinforce the point that SHE’S BEEN MARCHING FOR BREXIT! She’s done very well to get so much exposure for herself and the ‘no deal’ Brexit movement – but that doesn’t simply happen by chance.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Looks like I could’ve saved myself the trouble of writing this and just waited for the Daily Mail’s two-page spread on the Grant sisters.
Here are some pull-out bits…
Barbara Davies writes this as though her article is some kind of scoop (needless to say, I wrote all of this a week before her – and the sisters’ names have been known for a while now). But the question is: if Alice and Beatrice are such super-fans of Nigel Farage and ‘no deal’ Brexit, then why did it take till 5 April for this piece to be written – especially when the sisters have been so visible in the right-wing press and the Mail’s own coverage for months? In the Mail’s coverage of the Leave Means Leave rally on 14 December 2018, Alice featured prominently in three of the article’s 15 photos. In the photo of Alice and Nigel Farage she was captioned simply as “a young woman”. In a Mail Online article about the start of the March to Leave, Alice and Beatrice feature prominently again, third image down, where they’re captioned as “March to Leave marchers”. They feature prominently again in several images from the ‘Brexit Betrayal’ march, where they’re captioned as “young members of the march” and “supporters holding Believe in Britain placards” and “protesters dressed in red, white and blue”. So the question is: why write this article now? To what end?
I could be wrong, but this smacks of a ‘full transparency’ article, which aims to reveal all about the sisters in order to close down any further scrutiny.
Furthermore, there is an obvious irony in the privately educated granddaughters of the late industrialist and former Governor of the Bank of Scotland Sir Alistair Grant railing against “the elite”.
This video is interesting to watch in relation to this. The man who swears in the video looks like a sort of strange, olive-skinned ‘government agent’ who might have knocked on people’s doors in the 1960s to silence them after a UFO sighting. His dead-eyed stare at the end of the clip is actually quite chilling, and his use of such extreme language in front of two schoolgirls is quite something. Whether or not this man is the Grant sisters’ father, I don’t know? But he is clearly known to them.
As highlighted in my blog post, Alice follows the likes of Gerard Batten and Marine le Pen, both of whom she’s retweeted and quote-tweeted in a supportive manner during her short time on Twitter. In March 2018, Steve Bannon appeared alongside Marine Le Pen at a Front National rally, telling her supporters to wear assertions they are “racist” as a “badge of honour”. And in November 2018 Gerard Batten made the bold decision to hire Stephen Yaxley-Lennon as an official UKIP ‘advisor’ (someone even Piers Morgan has labelled a “bigoted lunatic stirring up hatred”), which shifted the party to the far right. It’s also been reported that both Batten and Yaxley-Lennon have recruited nazi muscle from the Polish division of the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA) to handle their personal security. If Alice and Beatrice don’t want to be labelled as far-right fascists and racists, then why do they follow people on that side of the political spectrum? They shouldn’t be allowed to play the victims in this piece.
If Alice had such an interest in politics, then why did she wait till her A-level course was underway before entering the Brexit debate? Her Twitter account contained absolutely zero political content till late November last year. Not a single thought or a retweet about Brexit or anything even vaguely political. Politics course or not, her conversion to the “Brexit cause” was very sudden indeed.
Again, this clip of Alice being interviewed on DWTV doesn’t bear this out. Her response to the interviewer is woolly horseshit disguised as stirring patriotism – I wouldn’t class it as intelligent or well-researched.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. I think we’re being hoodwinked by these people. Again.
LikeLiked by 1 person
To be honest, the Mail piece appears to have been a PR tool to ‘take back control’ of the story about the Grant family. It is clear this is PR.
LikeLike
Oh! Look who it is on the front page of https://thebrexitparty.org/ !
LikeLike
Ha! I know, they put a tweet out earlier today and she was front and centre. If you’ve watched the video on the Brexit Party’s homepage, you’ll also spot TPUK influencers Dominique Samuels and Joel Chilaka. Same faces…over and over and over again.
The Grant sisters also recently made the pages of Grazia. The publicity machine is in overdrive.
Incidentally, Carl Benjamin (aka ‘Sargon of Akkad’) interviewed the Grant sisters and their mother in January outside Parliament (a real soft-soap interview – nothing remarkably challenging). He is now UKIP’s candidate for the South West in the European elections.
LikeLike
Note also there are Youtube channels for both of them created in 2012 (a few months apart).. You take 6 years off and wonder why they have zero content Youtube channels at that moment in time….
LikeLike
She may very well be studying “A” Level Politics but I sincerely hope that she is not studying for an “A” Level in English Language. “Broadcasted”!?!?! I ask you! I would be asking for the school fees back if I were her father.
LikeLike
I’d like to contact you about a character I have filmed recently outside parliament, I am having difficulty identifying him and I wonder if you could help thanks J
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi SCC,
I’m getting in touch from Vice as we’d like to use a screenshot from this article in a documentary we’re making about the Grant girls. Please could you get in touch over email so we can chat further?
Many thanks,
Becs
LikeLike