Boris Johnson's (almost) defensible fib of £350m for NHS

It's the slogan that just won't die.

The potent "£350m/NHS" claim caused huge controversy during the EU referendum campaign and it was repeated this week by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, prompting the UK's leading statistician to accuse him of "clear misuse of official statistics".

What's all the fuss about? It was just a slogan, right? A marketing pitch in a sea of deceptive claims during the referendum.

Oh, but this one was clever in its trickery and its notoriety is well-earned.

It may have swung the referendum result and, therefore, changed the course of history.

Vote Leave strategist Dominic Cummings reflected after the result: "Would we have won without £350m/NHS? All our research and the close result strongly suggests no."

Where did the slogan come from? In 2011 Matthew Elliott ran the "No to AV" referendum campaign in which he discovered a successful formula: rather than talk about the democratic benefits or disadvantages of each electoral system, he focused his campaign on cost.

In his calculations for the cost of changing the UK's voting system he included the cost of the referendum itself. He then took this rather suspect figure of £250m and made slogans about how the money could be better spent on things like hospital equipment.

His opponents kept talking about it - partly because the figure was misleading - and therefore gave it more publicity. (This would happen again in 2016.) He won the AV referendum. 70% of people voted against it.

Matthew Elliott later became chief executive of Vote Leave and, 18 months before the campaign, he and Cummings ran focus groups about EU membership. Taking back control and wasting money on the EU budget were hugely resonant issues raised by members of the public.

In a 2014 report Cummings quotes a person saying that leaving the EU meant "we will save a fortune and we can spend that money on the NHS". The slogan began to write itself. So then they just needed an amount.

The latest figures show the gross contribution to the EU as a weekly payment is £326m. After the rebate, which is docked from the bill, it is £251m. Then if you include subsidies and other contributions that flow back from the EU, the actual net figure is £165m a week - about half of the amount on the Vote Leave bus. That makes the slogan seem like a rather big fib.

Elliott says he will defend the £350m figure until his dying day. He reasons that people refer to their gross salary so why not refer to the gross figure of what we send to the EU?

The row over the figure raged throughout the campaign and returned this weekend when the Foreign Secretary once again talked of £350m a week and how "a lot" of it could be used for the NHS.

The chairman of the UK's statistics authority said: "This confuses gross and net contributions.

"It also assumes that payments currently made to the UK by the EU, including for example support for agriculture and scientific research, would not continue to be paid by the UK government when we leave."

However, Johnson wrote back that this was a "wilful distortion" of his article. His argument is that, although £350m is a gross figure, the UK doesn't have control of how the EU spends the money in the UK.

He says: "I in fact said: 'once we have settled our accounts we will take back control of roughly £350m per week'. It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS."

This does give him wriggle room. The UK's priorities may amount to similar funds being attributed to farming and scientific research, but perhaps some will be diverted to health. "A lot of money" doesn't specify the full £350m.

These caveats makes the apparent fib more defensible.

I have checked interviews I conducted with Johnson during the campaign and at the time he said the same thing. One interview on the bus goes:

Johnson: "A proportion of that does come back to the UK - but it is spent at the whim, the dictate of EU officials. But half of that we never see again."

Me: "But the other half - you can't spend on the NHS - shouldn't it say £170m?"

Johnson: "What you can do is make sure the money that comes back to this country is spent on our priorities."

Me: "But you need to spend it on the NHS, because that's what the bus says."

Johnson: "And you could spend a lot more money on the NHS and other priorities such as farming."

Me: "You should write that on the bus."

Johnson: "It's a big bus but there's a limit the size of the slogan we can write on it."

While you could argue the case about subsidies, it's harder when it comes to the rebate. This mechanism automatically reduces the UK's contributions to the EU budget. It may be negotiable, and there had been some pressure to scrap it in the future - but it is simply disingenuous to pretend that it doesn't exist right now.

Paul Johnson from the Institute of Fiscal Studies told Sky News: "The £350m comes if you assume essentially that the EU would continue to pay us a rebate after we've stopped paying them. It makes no sense whatsoever.

"I've got the quote here from Boris Johnson which says 'we will take back control of £350m pounds a week'. Well we won't."

So let me try to lay this debate to rest. We don't send £350m to the EU and we won't have anything like that figure to spend on the NHS after we leave the EU. But Boris Johnson used nuance to avoid ever specifying that we would.

Even though you might have thought he said it.

But he travelled in a bus with a slogan emblazoned on it that didn't quite have his subtlety of delivery.