Thread by @sophie_e_hill

If you're a journalism or curious citizen looking to use public databases to identify political sleaze in the UK, check out my new tool, Crony Connect*! cronyconnect.com

*Yes, "Crony Connect" is supposed to be a pun on the quiz show "Only Connect".

**Yes, I know it's not as good as @My_Little_Crony... I'm doing my best here! 😅

The purpose of Crony Connect is to bring together a few important databases in one place and search them simultaneously:

-@CompaniesHouse company registrations
-@ElectoralCommUK political donations database
-@UKParliament MP's register of financial interests

Here's a quick example of why it's useful:

Let's say we're interested in Lord Andrew Feldman – once described as "David Cameron's oldest political friend" – and definitely a Tory party bigwig.

What happens if we search "Andrew Feldman" in the @ElectoralCommUK political donations database?

Nothing!

search.electoralcommission.org.uk/?currentPage=1…

Now, let's see what happens if we search for Andrew Feldman using Crony Connect.

The tool will first help you identify the individual by their month/year of birth (in this case I know from wikipedia that Feldman was born Feb 1966).

Now we can take those three "director IDs" in @CompaniesHouse and see which companies these IDs are associated with. Crony Connect has already done the search and the results are available on the "Companies" tab...

There are 22 matching companies, and we can see when Andrew Feldman was a director and what his specific role was.

Now here's the fun part: Crony Connect is going to take *all those company names* and include them in the next round of searches.

So instead of looking for "Andrew Feldman" in the donations database, we're going to look for "Andrew Feldman OR Policy Exchange OR Jayroma OR ... "

This all happens automatically once you enter the name of an individual. So you just need to hop over to the Donations tab to see the results. Bingo! We can see that Andrew Feldman is a very significant Conservative donor, but his donations were made via his company Jayroma.

If you were doing a manual search, you could easily have missed this linkage. Or you'd have to manually go back and forth between Companies House and the donations database.

Let Crony Connect do the hard work for you! cronyconnect.com

Of course, this tool is no substitute for careful, manual fact-checking. (Remember, different people can have the same name and month of birth!)

If you're interested in how it works, I wrote a blog post walking through the code: sophie-e-hill.com/post/2021-06-1…

This tool is still "in beta" (aka, might break at any moment) so please send me bug reports or general feedback via email (sophie DOT eva DOT hill AT gmail.com) or Twitter!