EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

Do you mean that there's less to it than the letter suggests?

I mean that it's possible to make allegations under parliamentary privilege that could not be successfully defended in a defamation action.

Bear in mind that under British law, it's up to the publisher of the allegation to prove that it's true - if it's true but the publisher can't prove it, they still lose the action.

If the narrative in the letter is accurate, you'd expect the media to be all over it - provided that they can clear it with their lawyers. They're not all over it, so I think that the stumbling block here is sufficient corroboration to be able to publish a robust story.

And they all know about the letter. I first heard about it through Peston - he tweeted a photo of it saying something very non-committal about it being 'interesting', which is about all you can do if you can't stand the story up outside of parliamentary privilege.

Edit - here's the tweet. He says 'worth reading'
https://twitter.com/peston/status/859468587332972544

Next edit - here's the Electoral Commission's response
https://twitter.com/electoralcommuk/status/859754641243996160

And Mullin's response to that
https://twitter.com/rogmull/status/859758061912825856

So - I mean, this is the age old dance of trying to stand up a story when you think you're onto something but you haven't quite got it yet. Except we live in an age now where you can see a lot of the inner workings of that process, and you have partisan websites (left and right) with few journalistic scruples and an ideological axe to grind who'll bang on about how the mainstream media is 'hushing up the truth' because they won't rush out a half-baked story.