The group behind the billboards that have been trolling politicians with their own words has raised £10,000 less than four hours after they launched a fundraiser.
Posters with embarrassing quotes from prominent MPs involved in Brexit have been appearing across the country since the new year.
The billboards have been claimed by a Twitter account called Led By Donkeys, and after their campaign garnered huge media coverage they decided to launch a fundraising campaign on Friday morning.
Their Crowdfunder page claims they are “six friends who wanted to highlight the hypocrisy of our politicians on Brexit” and that “every £1,000 raised is another one. It’s that simple. There’s no limit to how far we can go.”
They add they’re all volunteers who have been maintaining a “guerrilla operation” so far, but they now want to pay for the posters to go up for months at a time.
Outlining their mission, they say: “We all have family, friends and loved ones who voted Leave. Many of them believed the words of these politicians. By putting up their quotes as billboards we can all compare the promises made with reality.
“Let’s cut through today’s chaos by showing our fellow citizens that this Brexit failure was founded on lies and hypocrisy.”
Less than four hours after going up, they raised over £10,000.
On Wednesday four new billboards appeared in Dover. One of them quoted Dominic Raab’s lack of knowledge about the Dover-Calais crossing when he said in November last year: “I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this, but if you look at the UK and if you look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing.”
The group’s Twitter page has only been active since January 9, but already has over 23,000 followers.
The campaign provoked a response from David Davis earlier this week after he featured on one of the first billboards to appear.
It showed his quote: “There will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside.”
The quote was put on a Twitter background, but actually Davis made the remark in the Commons, and the same is true for several other posters, something the Led By Donkeys group note on their crowdfunder page.
Davis told HuffPost UK: “Not for the first time some of the Remain campaign think it’s proper to use a completely out of context and misleading quotation. Anybody who has read the original will see what was said was not implied by this.”