THROWN TO THE WOLVES

Furious family of Labour minister found dead after sex claims say: We told the party he was fragile

LABOUR leaders were accused last night of failing a minister who was found dead after being accused of sexual misconduct.

Carl Sargeant’s family said they had warned the party of their fears over his fragile mental state. They released a letter from his solici tor saying he had been denied any details of the allegations against him.

Welsh Assembly colleagues said he had been humiliated and isolated – without any finding of guilt. ‘It’s hard to understand why Carl was thrown to the wolves’, said one.

Mr Sargeant’s wife of 25 years, Bernie, issued an emotional statement with her children accusing Labour of failing to afford him ‘common courtesy, decency or natural justice’.

They criticised the conduct of first minister Carwyn Jones, who dismissed Mr Sargeant from his cabinet on Friday. They suggested a media interview he gave on Monday had prejudiced the case, leaving Mr Sargeant unable ‘to defend himself properly’.

He was found dead at his home in north Wales on Tuesday. Sir Alistair

Graham, the former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, said the Welsh First Minister had been too ‘hasty’ in sacking Mr Sargeant.

He told BBC Wales yesterday: ‘I have always believed you do not dismiss someone from a position – in this case a minister in the Welsh government – without first going through due process.’

He said the accused must know the allegations against him and be given the chance to ‘carefully consider them,’ as well as being given the chance to put forward a defence.

‘There is a duty of care,’ he said. ‘He’s part of the government and, of course, when serious allegations come which may go back many years then they can be a very serious shock to people.

‘He would have had to explain to his family that allegations had been made and you can feel very vulnerable – that seems to have happened in this case.’

Mr Sargeant’s family released correspondence between his solicitor and Labour from the day before he died to highlight their concern at how the case had been handled.

The letters showed the father of four pushed for more specific details on the claims, which were said to centre on several women accusing him of ‘unwanted attention, inappropriate touching or groping’.

And they said that the wait to find out exactly what he was accused of risked ‘his physical and mental wellbeing’.

It emerged yesterday that the accusations did not merit police investigation.

His solicitor, Huw Bowden, accused Mr Jones and his office of ‘clearly prejudicing what is allegedly an independent inquiry’, including by giving television interviews about the case on Monday.

A family spokesman said it was publishing the correspondence ‘in light of the contin- ued unwillingness’ of the Labour Party ‘to clarify the nature of the allegations’.

‘Up to the point of his tragic death on Tuesday morning Carl was not informed of any of the detail of the allegations against him, despite requests and warnings regarding his mental welfare,’ the spokesman said. ‘The correspondence also discloses the solicitor’s concern that media appearances by the First Minister on Monday were prejudicing the inquiry.

‘The family wish to disclose the fact that Carl maintained his innocence and he categorically denied any wrongdoing.

‘The distress of not being able to defend himself properly against these unspecified allegations meant he was not afforded com- mon courtesy, decency or natural justice.’ Mr Sargeant’s solictors last night issued a further statement accusing Labour of abandoning him in his hour of need.

They said: ‘It has been suggested that support was offered to Mr Sargeant. It is not clear in what form this support was suggested to have been offered but that is not correct. No support was offered to Mr Sargeant other than that personally offered by close friends and family.

‘Those that owed a clear duty of care to Carl and to his family will, no doubt in due course need to provide clarity on their respective positions in this tragedy.’

Writing the day before Mr Sargeant’s death, Mr Bowden raised concerns about how aides working for Mr Jones had contacted the accusers.

‘There appears to be a very real possibility that the evidence of the witnesses is being manipulated and numerous conversations with the witnesses by various members of

‘Categorically denied any wrongdoing’

the First Minister’s office at the very least must create uncertainties about the credibility of any evidence,’ he said.

Noting that a first hearing for the inquiry was not scheduled until January 16, Mr Bowden said: ‘With the Christmas period intervening ... the ongoing delay is both prejudicial to the preparation of our client’s case, but also to his physical and mental wellbeing.’

Labour Assembly Member Jenny Rathbone yesterday said Mr Sargeant ‘wasn’t dealt with fairly in the most basic sense’.

She told BBC Radio Wales: ‘If allegations are made against you, you must know what they are so that you can respond to them.’

Dawn Butler, Labour’s women and equalities spokesman, initially issued a call for an investigation into how Welsh Labour handled the case, telling BBC Radio 5 Live that ‘it doesn’t sound as though everything that should have hap- pened, happened’. But less than an hour later Miss Butler released a statement saying no investigation was needed: ‘I have looked further into the process followed in this case. I am satisfied that the appropriate process was followed.’

A close friend of Mr Sargeant’s said he was ‘sentenced to death’ by the system he dedicated his life to working for.

Askar Sheibani, a Labour activist, said: ‘It’s disgusting and sad that the system had failed him. The system sentenced him to death. The same system that he proudly fought for.

‘Society has sacrificed an effective and good political representative. If there was a proper system and proper support in place from the beginning this would not have happened. He was a human being, and he could only take so much.’

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UNTIL the Fifties, the lynch mob was one of the ugliest aspects of American life. In segregated Southern states, whites seized victims — almost invariably black men accused of raping or merely behaving disrespectfully towards white women — and hanged them.

The supposed offenders, who early in the last century were numbered in hundreds, were often later found to be innocent. But by then they were dead, and, anyway, only a few liberal do-gooders cared.

Today, in Britain, we are in danger of reviving that repugnant culture.

Almost daily we see terrible charges laid against both the living and the dead, broadcast through social media, inflicting grievous pain on a host of people, some of whom have done nothing wrong at all, while others have done nothing so base as to deserve public branding.

It happens in flagrant defiance of libel and slander law, without obligation to produce a shred of proof.

This week, a senior Labour politician killed himself, having been suspended by the Welsh government following unspecified allegations of sexual harassment.

Carl Sargeant, 49, had told friends that, since the nature of the charges had not been disclosed to him, he felt unable to offer any defence.

I know nothing of the misdeeds Sargeant may, or may not, have committed. But it seems profoundly shocking that he should have been driven to take his own life, without the allegations being revealed. His family say they concerned ‘unwanted attention, touching and groping’.

It is only the most dramatic of a long succession of brutal claims: people — including children — are daily sentenced to public embarrassment or outright disgrace, without examination of evidence, or a jury’s verdict.

In 2012, Lord McAlpine, a former Tory treasurer, was falsely alleged by BBC2’ s Newsnight — though at first not named — to be a child abuser. The Commons Speaker’s wife, Sally Bercow, had to pay £15,000 damages for joining the odious persecution of McAlpine which went viral on social media.

Hounding

McAlpine gave the money to the Chelsea Pensioners, shortly before his 2014 death, which friends said had been hastened by this wicked libel.

Meanwhile, BBC presenter Mark Lawson, a fine broadcaster, was summarily dismissed in 2014 from a longserving role on Radio 4’s Front Row arts programme for alleged ‘bullying’ of colleagues, after which he suffered a nervous breakdown.

People who should have known better, some seemingly motivated by personal grudges, joined a witch-hunt against him on Twitter and Facebook.

I have written about the appalling treatment of FieldMarshal Lord Bramall and the late Edward Heath. It seems extraordinary that former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard HoganHowe should recently have been granted a peerage, given his role in hounding Bramall — an investigation worthy of East Germany’s Stasi.

It is even more appalling that Wiltshire’s chief constable, Mike Veale, is said to be planning a handsomely pensioned retirement, after smearing the long- deceased Edward Heath.

Mr Veale brought public disgust upon himself by announcing that, had Heath still been alive, he would have been interviewed under caution, despite his force’s inquiry having failed to find a wisp of plausible evidence of wrongdoing.

What is happening to us, as a society? How can people — never mind the police — treat fellow citizens, living or dead, with such cruelty? Do we no longer care for the great principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’?

Social media bears a huge responsibility — it makes possible the propagation of outrageous charges, without accusers being identified or needing to justify themselves, far less of the laws of slander or libel being invoked.

Some years ago, I received a letter from a man with whom I was at Charterhouse School, then serving a prison sentence for sexual offences. ‘How would you feel,’ he asked, ‘if I now falsely accused you of having assaulted me behind the bike sheds at Charterhouse?’

I responded with a flippancy I would not dare employ today, saying it was implausible, because at 15 I was irredeemably unattractive to both sexes.

Now, I find it frighteningly possible that, when public passions run so high and online malevolence is so easy to vent, someone could lay sexual allegations against me at the touch of a button. I am no more nor less guilty than Edwin Bramall.

Since my former schoolfellow was convicted in a court, I had little doubt that (though I regretted it, because I liked him) he was guilty as charged.

But Welsh Assembly member Carl Sargeant was never charged with anything; nor was the BBC’s Mark Lawson, nor the late Edward Heath.

In among the undoubtedly valid allegations of sexual harassment being made against some politicians, we may be certain there are also monstrous fabrications. On another front, the Russians — supreme online saboteurs of justice and democracy — are playing the fake news game in the Baltic states, which they aim to destabilise.

Putin’s trolls have spread rumours that the named commanding officer of one Western troop contingent is having an adulterous affair with a Latvian; of another colonel, that he is betraying his wife with a Lithuanian.

This may sound comic: but think of the effect on the morale of soldiers in the region if the Russians succeed in their sophisticated efforts to wreck these officers’ marriages.

Social media already undermines democratic debate on both sides of the Atlantic with a diet of fake news which far too many people swallow.

Salacious

Now, unsourced allegations threaten also to overwhelm decent values. I am dismayed by the number of supposedly educated people I meet, still determined to believe Edward Heath guilty of sexual offences, tittering ‘no smoke without fire’. But there often is.

As a newspaper editor for 16 years, I can testify that a great many delicious, salacious rumours about public figures are absolutely unfounded.

Most people, whether famous or obscure, live rather more respectable lives than gossipmongers would like us to believe. Our Parliament, like other legislatures around the world, is sooner or later going to have to grasp the infinitely prickly nettle of taming social media, imposing regulation which must include a requirement to disclose the identities of libellers and slanderers.

Anger increases rather than diminishes with time towards Sir Brian Leveson, the foolish judge who produced a 2012 report condemning Press excesses while making no recommendations to regulate social media or non-newspaper websites.

He concluded that: ‘People will not assume that what they read on the internet is trustworthy.’

Deplorable

Some of us said then that, however deplorable some newspapers’ behaviour — phone-hacking and suchlike — it was absurd to deploy a sledgehammer against print media while blithely ignoring the vastly more frightening threat posed by Twitter, Facebook and their kin.

The RAND corporation, one of the U.S.’s foremost thinktanks, recently spoke of Russia using social media to deliver ‘a firehose of falsehood’, and it was not wrong. Let me end where I started. Welsh Cabinet minister Carl Sargeant may be shown to have behaved badly towards women. It should nonetheless be a source of shame to the rest of us, British society, that he was driven to kill himself without any specific charge, let alone a criminal indictment, being laid.

His family say he was ‘denied natural justice’, and they are right. The influence of social media upon us all is certainly malign, arguably evil.

Unless we recognise the new lynch mob for what it is — and find a way to cage it — this electronic wild beast will devour values that are indispensable to any civilised society, fairness and trust foremost among them.