Oh brothers! Union barons at war over their swanky homes
IT IS the union power struggle likely to determine Jeremy Corbyn’s fate as Labour leader.
But the battle to become general secretary of Unite has turned into ‘property wars’ as the incumbent ‘Red’ Len McCluskey and his challenger Gerard Coyne trade insults over their expensive homes.
McCluskey has swung the support of Unite, Britain’s biggest union and Labour’s largest backer, behind Corbyn. But throughout the contest Coyne has been heavily critical of McCluskey’s backing for the Labour leader.
The row started after Mr Coyne demanded to know why the union had helped Mr McCluskey to buy a £700,000 flat in a fashionable part of South London. He said this was typical of ‘the McCluskey culture of freebies and favours’.
A furious Mr McCluskey, 66, tried to take the sting out of the attack last week by claiming his flat ‘overlooks a council estate’, while Mr Coyne, 49, was ‘living in a million pound mansion in the countryside’. However, when a Mail on Sunday reporter went to check Mr McCluskey’s two-bedroom property this weekend they found a plush
‘It’s a plush penthouse in a buzzing area’ IN THE RED CORNER. . . COYNE’S £1m ‘MANSION’ IN THE REDDER CORNER ... LEN’S £700,OOO FLAT
modern penthouse in the shadow of Britain’s tallest building, the Shard.
It’s situated in a buzzing area home to celebrities such as actor Eddie Redmayne, fashion expert Gok Wan, Olympic diver Tom Daley, singer PJ Harvey and Blur drummer Dave Rowntree. And instead of a council estate, the union baron’s rear balcony directly overlooks a five- a- side football pitch and a school – although local authority flats are visible further away.
Mr Coyne’s home is even more out of the reach of blue-collar Unite members. He l i ves with wife Lisa in a £1 million detached house deep in the rolling Worcestershire countryside. But Mr Coyne’s aides say that ‘unlike Len’, Mr Coyne ‘found the money for the house himself ’, and point out that the £417,000 which Unite stumped up for Mr McCluskey’s flat is equal to the annual union fees of almost 2,500 of its members.
Voting in the election started at the end of March, with the result due by the middle of the month. Mr Coyne has made the Labour leader’s poor performance in the polls an issue in the election and dismissed Mr McCluskey as Corbyn’s ‘puppet master’. In an article for today’s Mail on Sunday, above, Jack Dromey, who is married to former Deputy Leader Harriet Harman, becomes t he most significant Labour MP to openly take sides in the election by calling on Unite members to back Mr Coyne.
Unite defends t he fi nancing arrangement for Mr McCluskey’s flat as an ‘accepted and profitable investment’ because it took the form of an equity share in the property which will rise in line with house prices.
Mr McCluskey also claims that he deserves the perk, saying that ‘Unite has always assisted employees from outside London with the capital’s soaring housing costs’. He said yesterday. ‘While Jack Dromey and the Coyne campaign continue to sling mud and drag the great name of this union and its members into the gutter, I have been getting on with the day job’.
A spokeswoman for Mr McCluskey’s re-election campaign said: ‘Len stands by what he has said [about the council estate] but this discussion is absurd.
‘It arises only because Gerard Coyne is unable to offer any serious policies to the trade union members he purports to want to represent and improve the lives of. ’