Grant 'V' Shapps: another pseudonym for the marketer and Tory party chair?

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/17/grant-v-shapps-tory-party-chair-middle-name

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Some know him as millionaire web marketer Michael Green while others call him plain old Grant Shapps. But it has emerged that the Conservative party chairman has a mystery middle name: “V”.

The senior MP, no stranger to a pseudonym, appears to have adopted the middle initial when he signed up as a Tory parliamentary candidate in 2001.

There was no sign of the “V” on his birth certificate from 1968 or his marriage certificate in 1997.

But for the 2001 and 2005 elections he became “Grant V Shapps” and, according to the electoral roll, is still registered under that name at his home address in Hatfield, Hertfordshire.

Asked about the puzzling middle initial, Shapps was quoted in the Sun: “Jokingly, my parents once suggested I call myself ‘Five’ because I don’t have a middle name.

“I am aware ‘V’ has appeared as my middle initial, for example on Wikipedia. But I have never used it myself.”

The mystery middle name emerged a day after Shapps admitted he had a second job as a web marketer under the name Michael Green while serving as the Conservative MP for Welwyn Hatfield.

It is a suggestion that Shapps has repeatedly denied for three years, but he admitted it after the Guardian discovered a recording from 2006 in which Shapps boasts that his products could make listeners a “ton of cash by Christmas”.

Shapps also sought “compensation in lieu of damages” from one of his constituents and demanded that he post an apology over claims about the Conservative chairman’s use of the name Michael Green while an MP.

Letters sent last October and November by lawyers acting for Shapps to Dean Archer, a chauffeur and former Labour councillor, reveal aggressive demands to retract what was described as a “defamatory allegation” made in a posting on Facebook.

The October letter, which was sent on Shapps’s behalf by the international City firm Hill Dickinson, then asked for Archer’s “proposals for compensating our client in lieu of damages and (an) undertaking to indemnify our client in full for his legal costs”.