Which ‘Friend Of Dave’will theTatler Tory scandal ruin?

THE sordid saga of alleged bullying, drug-taking, blackmail and sexual manipulation among young Tories in campaign groups organised by the party’s central office belies the slick sheen of a modernised party. Now the scandal – first exposed by this newspaper’s Political Editor – is moving dangerously close to David Cameron’s top team and dragging in a longstanding FOD (Friend of Dave).

A series of reports over several months in The Mail on Sunday laid bare the shocking behaviour of the sociopathic functionary, Mark Clarke, whose appalling conduct is said to have ranged from sexual exploitation of fellow volunteers to emailed threats and serial bullying of co-workers.

Clarke has been hastily stripped of his membership. But it won’t end there.

As little as leaders like to be associated with the grimmer antics of their party ranks, they invariably tarnish them.

On one level, Clarke’s habit of issuing ‘black marks’ and dire reprisals for those who crossed him is comically awful, in the style of Rik Mayall’s ‘Tory Boy’ Alan B’Stard. But there are more serious allegations, namely that he encouraged young activists to sleep with politicians in order to blackmail them. This newspaper revealed pressure put on Robert Halfon, now Tory deputy chairman, apparently at Clarke’s behest, over his affair.

Clarke’s aggression is said to have been a contributing factor in the apparent suicide of activist Elliott Johnson, 21.

‘All parties have some dubious characters,’ a Tory central office source tells me airily. I doubt the attempt to pass this off as roistering behaviour by a callow (and frequently inebriated) youth wing will wash. For one thing, Clarke was no ingénue. He was already in his mid-30s during the infamous road trips in the run-up to the General Election and had made the candidates’ list.

Getting rid of a swathe of volunteer officials in the ironicallynamed Conservative Future group, as the party has done this week, is a panicky distraction: who cares what happens to a lot of oafish twentysomething non-entities in bad hats?

We can bank on a senior scalp being offered up. Grant Shapps, party chairman in the run-up to the Election, will take the rap. That’s fair, but only to a point. Shapps heavily promoted Clarke, despite a slew of complaints for harassment made against him and protected him when awkward questions needed to be addressed. But he is in the wilderness anyway: given no senior role after the Election campaign, despite the Tories success.

Poor relations with Cameron’s friends – including party cochairman Andrew Feldman – during the campaign have killed off Shapps’s once-promising career. After an outing during the campaign, the PM told a friend he admired Shapps’s energy as a campaigner but thought he was ‘quite odd’ and ‘didn’t much like spending time with him’.

This week, Cameron has told trusted ministers that he is ‘thoroughly dismayed’ by the lurid tale and No10 is keen to ‘cauterize’ the scandal. So two separate investigations are under way. Where does that leave Feldman, who signed off the finances for the road trip campaigns? Dave will hope to shield a man who has been his friend since their days at the same Oxford College.

So close has he remained to Cameron that, when Dave needed to rehearse his appearance at the Leveson Inquiry and the relations between the Press and politicians, Feldman acted out the role of the cross-examining legal counsel, to help sharpen the PM’s defences.

Now he is running one of the inquiries into how parts of Tory HQ came to resemble a snakepit. But as this story slithers from satire to sleaze and pure tragedy, not even the best protected political allies will escape without tarnish.

Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist