Portrait of a Tory cad
As it’s revealed Tory peer warned top brass about him TEN MONTHS ago ...
ASTRANGE and somewhat seedy ritual took place in the function room of a modestly priced Cornish hotel on the evening of Saturday, January 24, this year. As around 60 guests tucked into the buffet chicken curry, washed down with free beer and wine, a man in his mid-30s got to his feet and began reading out a list of names. Most of them belonged to young women in their early 20s who were sitting in his audience. This group, he said, were going to be presented with special awards celebrating their most striking character traits — and the awards would take the form of Mister Men books.
One of the young women was handed Little Miss Chatterbox, on account of her outgoing personality. Another, a redhead, was given Little Miss Late, in apparent reference to her habit of oversleeping. A third, a dark-haired girl, was presented with Little Miss naughty.
‘There was a crude story to go with this final gong,’ says a witness. ‘It was in recognition of her behaviour during a recent night out. She’d done something quite — shall we say? — salacious.’
The woman duly blushed as her misdeed was outlined by the speaker, a married father of two young children.
Then, as the gift was presented to her (to the sort of boorish cheers you might encounter on a stag or hen night), he placed a proprietorial arm around her shoulder and posed for a photograph.
‘She was laughing, but it was an uncomfortable laugh,’ adds the witness. ‘Given the personal nature of the story, not to mention his wandering hands, it seemed quite inappropriate. Especially in light of the ugly things we now know.’
Quite so. For while this alcoholfuelled dinner, with its public joshing of female guests, may seem reminiscent of an 18-30s holiday, it was actually organised by David Cameron’s Conservative Party.
Indeed, the events that took place that night, and on several similar occasions, are now at the centre of an unfolding scandal that has engulfed some of the most senior figures within his Government.
At the heart of this controversy is the 38- year- old speaker who organised the evening’s festivities: a suddenly notorious Tory activist and former parliamentary candidate called Mark Clarke.
Mr Clarke, who went to a private school, is dubbed ‘the Tatler Tory’ because the magazine once tipped him as a future Cabinet minister.
Today, his political career is in tatters amid allegations that he presided over a culture of bullying, drug-taking, blackmail and sexual aggression within the party’s youth organisation, RoadTrip 2015.
Fallout from his downfall also threatens the career of Grant Shapps, the former party chairman.
Mr Shapps has vigorously denied ignoring complaints about Clarke’s conduct. However, it yesterday emerged that he’d received a written warning about him from Baroness Warsi, a Tory peer.
Her letter was dated January 20 this year. It accused Clarke of openly abusing her on Twitter and stated: ‘I look forward to hearing from you as to what action you intend to take against … Mr Clarke.’
The scandal began making headlines in September, when Elliott Johnson, a 21-year-old Tory activist, was found dead on a railway track in Bedfordshire. It emerged that, weeks earlier, he’d filed a formal complaint with Party bosses, accusing Mr Clarke of bullying him.
It appeared that Elliott had left a suicide note that made hairraising claims about Clarke’s behaviour, and named a string of other young activists whom he’d allegedly mistreated.
Party bosses duly contacted the individuals on that list and around 25 promptly filed formal complaints. They reportedly alleged everything from bullying to drug-taking to sexual aggression by Clarke.
One complainant claimed: ‘ He grabbed me by the neck and started running his hands over me. I wouldn’t call it attempted rape, but it was certainly an assault.’
Most of the 25 (whose testimony is being pored over by Edward Legard, a judge appointed to conduct a formal inquiry) were supposedly targeted on RoadTrip events. Take, for example, the night in Cornwall. At least two of the young women present have complained of their treatment by Clarke in the aftermath of the boorish ‘prize-giving’ (a regular feature of RoadTrip dinners) when guests adjourned to the hotel bar.
One says she was subjected to an unwanted sexual advance.
Clarke stands accused of pursuing these liaisons while being married to his long- suffering wife Sarah, mother of his two children, and also conducting a long-running affair with a fellow RoadTrip organiser called India Brummit.
This mess (there really is no other way to describe it) is lapping at the doors of Conservative HQ, where senior officials are accused of ignoring or covering up complaints about Clarke so as not to disrupt the General Election campaign.
Aside from Shapps, they include party chairman Lord Feldman — a tennis chum of David Cameron at Oxford, whose sister Deborah is a close friend of Clarke.
Lord Feldman claims to have been unaware of any such complaints before August. However, the Times reported yesterday that an official called Paul Abbott had sent him a memo detailing various concerns in the summer of 2014.
They also include Baroness (Emma) Pidding, a former party volunteer who chaired the RoadTrip and arranged for Clarke to share a stage with Cameron earlier this summer.
Yet the most fascinating figure in the unfolding soap opera is surely Clarke — a man of singular political ambition who remains utterly defiant and unapologetic, and who formally denies each and every claim of wrongdoing
In a statement to the BBC last week, Clarke even vowed to ‘take legal action for defamation’ against critics, once the inquest into Elliott Johnson’s death is completed.
While that comment alarmed some of the young party activists who complained about his conduct, it clearly hasn’t convinced the Tory Party. They have decided to expel him for life, come what may.
Take an extended look at Clarke’s career, however, and it’s tempting to wonder what took them so long. A journeyman marketing consultant, whose career included extended periods as a freelance, along with a stint at Proctor & Gamble (‘He likes to boast to girls that his legacy there was to invent the pack of multi- size tampons,’ says a friend), Clarke burst onto the political scene in 2006, when he was elected chairman of Conservative Future, the party’s youth wing.
He used his first interview, with the London Evening Standard, to portray himself as the scion of a political dynasty: the great nephew of Dame Eugenia Charles, a famous West Indian politician.
‘ My great- aunt, the former Conservative Prime Minister of Dominica … was christened the Iron Lady of the Caribbean for leading the world to overthrow a communist dictatorship in Grenada,’ he said. ‘She was inspirational to me as a teenager. She showed me you could change things.’
A cute tale — but not the entire truth. Dame Eugenia Charles is not Mr Clarke’s great- aunt: their connection is more tenuous.
Clarke’s maternal grandfather, Carlos, had a sister, Winifred, who was married to Eugenia’s brother, Rennie. Technically, this means they’re not blood relations.
In 2007, Clarke was selected as Tory candidate in his native Tooting, South London, giving a series of interviews in which he cast himself as a compassionate, progressive Conservative in the mould of David Cameron.
In the Telegraph, he claimed to have ‘grown up on a council estate’
He grabbed me and was running his hands over me Clarke remains utterly defiant and unapologetic
and ‘ experienced poverty’ before being saved by the Thatcher government’s assisted places scheme, by which the taxpayer paid for gifted, but poor children to attend top public schools.
‘I went to a private school on an assisted place — an example of Conservatives giving people routes out of poverty,’ he declared.
‘All the opportunities in my life came from Conservatism.’
Again, a tale that sits awkwardly with basic facts.
Clarke claims on social networking sites Friends Reunited and LinkedIn to have attended Dulwich College from 1985, when he was eight. (Today, day fees are £6,000 per term.)
Prior to that, he says he was at Wimbledon Common Preparatory School — an establishment that costs £12,000 per year. In fact, the assisted places scheme — which ran until 1997 — only subsidised the education of pupils aged 11 or older. So it can’t have paid any of Clarke’s fees at Wimbledon nor subsidised his first three years at Dulwich.
In truth, his family background was complicated, but prosperous enough to underwrite private schooling. Clarke’s father, Dennis Ogden, was an accountant. His mother Madeleine is a successful psychotherapist with a company registered in Chelsea and a string of celebrity clients.
His maternal grandfather, Carlos ‘Bertie’ Clarke, was a West Indian test cricketer who emigrated to Britain in the Forties, attended medical school and became a wellknown GP who practiced in Pimlico and was awarded the OBE in 1983.
The earliest property records available show that in 1991, Mark lived with Madeleine (who had divorced the alcoholic Ogden in the early Eighties) not on a council estate, but in a semi- detached house on a leafy residential street just off Tooting Common.
Friends describe his background as comfortable.
‘I wouldn’t call it wealthy by London standards, but neither was Mark hard up,’ says one.
‘He might have briefly lived on a
council estate when he was very young, but not for long. So it’s highly misleading to say he “grew up” on one. And these days, his family is, frankly, extremely posh.’
Indeed, Mark’s mother is married to Patrick Bellville, a socialite who moves in aristocratic circles: his former wife Lucinda Wallop is the daughter of Viscount Lymington and sister to the 10th Earl of Portsmouth, one of Hampshire’s smartest landowners.
When I raised this issue, as well as the question of his assisted place, with Mark Clarke this week, he insisted: ‘I have not lied about my past or upbringing.’
We must, of course, take him at his word.
In any case, gossip in political circles soon began to focus not on apparent holes in his life story, but instead on Clarke’s extraordinarily colourful love life.
During the mid- to- late 2000s, he’d stepped out with a revolving cast of the young woman he met via politics.
They included, among many, many others, the journalist Melissa Kite; a well-known MP’s daughter; a Conservative blogger; Sarah Gill, a nurse he met in Tooting; Justine Greening, the future Tory frontbencher; Sarah Dawson, an NHS manager who would become his wife; and the aforementioned India Brummitt. Many relationships overlapped.
Indeed, one former girlfriend tells me: ‘You’ve named seven girls, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. There were six or seven times as many notches on his bedpost. And a lot of them felt terribly treated.’
One such woman was Sarah Gill, Clarke’s official girlfriend during much of the campaign for Tooting, whose devotion extended to taking part in formal photo-calls with him.
It wasn’t to last, however. After she’d been dumped, Gill gave an interview to a Sunday newspaper making a string of unsavoury remarks about his attitude to women and claiming that he treated her ‘appallingly’.
Clarke denied the allegations. But they did little to dampen growing rumours that his dubious romantic entanglements called into question his suitability for public office. Those fears were further stoked in 2009, when the 32-year-old Clarke began a liaison with Brummitt, who was then an 18-yearold intern on his campaign.
The pair were once interrupted by campaign staffers while having sex on a pool table in the deserted back room of South London pub.
Today, she remains his mistress, and earlier this year, they openly shared hotel bedrooms during RoadTrip events.
‘Mark loves his wife. He loves his two daughters. But he has a flaw: he can’t stop sh*****g,’ says a close associate.
‘The India thing in particular makes me and lots of other people deeply uncomfortable. It reflects badly on him. But he can’t help himself.’
Allies also became concerned when, as the campaign progressed, he began upsetting several members of the local Tory Party.
‘Mark can be abrasive,’ says one friend. ‘He often lost his temper with local volunteers and party workers, and even with staff at Central Office. For a candidate, that isn’t the done thing.’
So angry were some Tooting activists that in the aftermath of the 2010 election (when he lost to Labour’s Sadiq Khan), a lengthy dossier was sent to Conservative HQ suggesting that ‘he didn’t seem to know the difference between right and wrong’.
Clarke was duly removed from the party’s list of approved candidates. But the snub did nothing to dent his political ambitions. Quite the reverse, in fact.
‘After 2010, Mark decided to pull out all the stops to return to the candidates list by making himself indispensable to the Conservative party,’ says a friend.
A first step was to regularise his private life: Clarke married Sarah Dawson, an NHS manager, in 2012. They brought a £606,000 home in Tooting and set about starting a family. A second was to launch the Trade Union Reform Campaign, which would lobby against the public subsidy of trade unions.
Yet Clarke’s overarching desire for influence seems to have been his Achilles heel. In 2012, he faced ridicule regarding his Twitter account, when a Left-wing blogger, Sunny Hundal, revealed that almost all of his 48,000 followers were ‘fake’ accounts. He denied purchasing them, but has never shed light on how they came to exist.
Unbowed, Clarke launched RoadTrip 2015 the following year.
It proposed sending busloads of energetic young party activists to key target seats for weekend-long trips. After leafleting or canvassing during the day, attendees would be given free drinks and dinners and heavily subsidised hotel rooms.
The concept took a while to take off, not least since the Conservatives already had a similar, official campaign called Team 2015.
‘What essentially happened was that Mark began pulling strings to ensure that Team 2015 failed, and his campaign succeeded,’ says one prominent young Conservative. ‘So people who signed up on Facebook to Team 2015 events, or clicked “Like” about them, would get a call from one of his associates telling them not to go, talking about how dreadful it would be, and telling them to go on a RoadTrip instead.
‘ If they didn’t take heed, then things started getting quite nasty.’
One person who can vouch for this Sarah Jane Sewell, a deputy chairman of Conservative Future, who says that her reputation was ‘besmirched in the most abhorrent fashion’ after falling out with Clarke.
Many others did agree to attend, though. ‘Soon Team 2015, which was run by Grant Shapps, was getting almost no one to turn up, but the RoadTrips were buzzing,’ says an associate.
‘Partly this was because of the pressure they were put under. But partly it was because Mark did something no- one had done before: he made campaigning for the Tories fun, and edgy, and exciting for young people. ‘Of course, there was always something a bit creepy about this 37-year- old married man getting drunk and going to nightclubs with kids in their teens and early 20s each weekend. And rumours about his behaviour started doing the rounds early on.
‘But on a purely political level, the RoadTrips worked.’ Shapps was impressed, and soon asked Clarke to bring RoadTrip ‘in house’ to become part of the official Tory campaign.
‘Mark agreed,’ adds the ally. ‘ It was what he’d always wanted, as he thought it would help rebuild his reputation.’ Everything went swimmingly — in public at least — until just after polling day. At that point Clarke, who is occasionally prone to paranoia, began to suspect that Shapps and his allies were attempting to take unwarranted credit for RoadTrip’s success. ‘Mark thought people were out to get him,’ says a friend. ‘So he registered RoadTrip 2020 as an independent company, with him as the only director, to stop the Tories from running it in future without him.’
Among the people to fall foul of Clarke was, of course, Elliott Johnson, a young activist who by August this year was working for the Conservative Way Forward blog.
Theirs was, in hindsight, an absurdly petty falling out: Johnson had failed to mention Clarke in an article regarding Tory prospects in Tooting.
In response, Clarke angrily confronted him at the Marquis of Granby, a pub in Westminster — an incident which spawned the original bullying complaint from Mr Johnson.
The rights and wrongs of what subsequently occurred will be pored over by a coroner early next year.
During the inquest, Clarke will most likely be given a chance to share, for the first time, his detailed version of events — and perhaps to lay bare his dealings with the Tory high command.
He doubtless has much explosive information up his sleeve. So who would bet against this simmering scandal, and the brash and often hugely divisive figure at its centre, poisoning Tory discourse for a very long time to come?
The pair were having sex on a pub pool table