Labour’s minister for women is accused of outing her aide as gay, tearing at her hair and calling her shoes ‘dyke boots’. So why is she still in her job?
As burka row Boris is hung out to dry, the Labour scandal that’s gone unnoticed
RAINBOW flag held aloft, no one could have been a more enthusiastic supporter of the Swansea LGBT Spring Pride event in May than Labour’s Shadow Women and Equalities minister, Carolyn Harris.
The married 57yearold deputy Welsh Labour leader mingled with hundreds of people in the sunshine, dancing to music as the parade made its way through the streets.
Described on her website as a ‘champion of change’, the Swansea East MP broke off from the festivities to speak to an interviewer of her passion for defending minorities.
‘Labour are committed to making sure our LGBT community get all the rights and respect they deserve,’ she said in a YouTube video.
‘I’m very proud to be here in my home city and am looking forward to a glorious day with my friends, and people who have come from wide and far to help us celebrate diversity.’
It’s hard to reconcile that image with the one of Mrs Harris painted by her gay former aide.
Today, Mrs Harris’s political career appears to hang in the balance, as senior party members call for her to be sacked over courtroom allegations — made by Jenny Lee Clarke — that she is a ‘homophobic bully’.
It must be said at the outset that Mrs Harris — a political ‘ragstoriches’ success story, who once worked as a school dinner lady and rose to the highest ranks in Westminster — vehemently denies these allegations.
They were made during the trial of Miss Clarke, her former constituency office manager, on fraud and forgery charges. Last week, Miss Clarke was cleared at Cardiff Crown Court after being accused of awarding herself a £2,000 pay rise and cutting her work hours without her boss’s authority.
Miss Clarke, 42, had been accused of forging Mrs Harris’s signature on a form, submitted to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority ( Ipsa) in August 2015, increasing her £37,000ayear salary and reducing her 40hour working week to 37.5 hours.
When Ipsa sent a confidential email to Mrs Harris to confirm the change, the prosecution claimed Miss Clarke accessed the MP’s account and replied: ‘Yes, this is correct.’
But Miss Clarke insisted she was following Mrs Harris’s verbal instructions, claiming it was common practice for her to sign forms on behalf of the ‘ overbearing’ MP, whom, she said, ‘detested paperwork’.
Indeed, the picture Miss Clarke painted of a highly dysfunctional office — hotly disputed by the MP — raises questions about Carolyn Harris’s suitability for the Shadow front bench role.
For Miss Clarke claimed in court that the MP had also ‘outed’ her to colleagues, after she confided in Mrs Harris she was gay in 2011, quizzed her on her sex life and made fun of her ‘dyke’ boots.
Here, in her first interview since she was cleared, Miss Clarke reveals she, too, was at the Swansea Pride event — and hid from her former boss.
‘I felt sick when I saw her dancing, waving her arms and laughing with people at the parade. I was so overwhelmed by anxiety, I was shaking,’ says Miss Clarke.
‘From the day I confided in her that I was in a gay relationship, her attitude towards me seemed to change overnight.’
Miss Clarke also alleged in court that in November 2014, Mrs Harris had grabbed her by the hair as she sat at her desk, violently shaking her head — a claim strenuously denied by the MP
Instead, Mrs Harris described a ‘lovely’ office atmosphere filled with ‘ banter’, where colleagues were friends who laughed and talked about ‘anything and everything’.
As for the reference to ‘dyke’ boots, she said: ‘I don’t remember saying that, but if I did, it would have been banter. I’m certainly not homophobic. I’m an ally of the LGBT community and I always have been.’
The jury took just 90 minutes to acquit Miss Clarke, who has joined calls for the MP to resign from the front bench, claiming working for Mrs Harris left her a ‘nervous wreck’ on antidepressants.
‘I gave nine years of loyalty to Carolyn, but she never showed me any of the respect I watched her give to the marchers at Spring Pride,’ she says.
Sitting in the twobedroom council maisonette she shares with daughter Rachael, 22, tears well up as she recalls how her dream job turned sour, ending with her arrest and the threat of up to two years in jail.
‘All I’m guilty of is being naive and stupid,’ she says. ‘Nothing happened in that office that Carolyn didn’t know about. She called me her “office angel”, but working for her felt like being in the Army. Sometimes I felt more like a slave than an employee.
‘If I could go back, I’d insist on doing everything by the book, but I put up and shut up because I was a single parent and I didn’t want to lose a wellpaid job.’
MISS
Clarke was a mature student at Swansea University, reading social sciences and criminology, when she became a parttime aide for the then Swansea East MP, Sian James, in September 2008.
She worked as case worker in the busy office, dealing with constituents’ problems. A lifelong Labour supporter, she loved her new job.
Heading the small team was Carolyn Harris, who was office manager. From the start, Miss Clarke — who saw little of MP Mrs James, who was often in the House of Commons — says she found Mrs Harris ‘forceful, loud, abrupt, bossy and lacking in tact’.
Single mother Miss Clarke had split from her male partner of 17 years when their daughter was five. In 2010, she started her first gay relationship with neighbour Rihanna Power, 32, who she’s still with. ‘ When I met Rhianna, something just clicked,’ she says. ‘I was the happiest I’d ever been in a relationship.’
In 2011, during a meeting to discuss work performance, Miss Clarke decided to confide in Mrs Harris: ‘It was no one else’s business, but the very next day in the office Carolyn started going on about how I had some news for everyone,’ she says.
‘My colleagues kept asking: “What is it, Jen?” I felt goaded into revealing I was in a gay relationship. One colleague rolled her eyes and said: “Is that it? I thought you were going to say you had cancer, the way Carolyn was going on.” ’
THEN,
Miss Clarke claims, Mrs Harris’s comments about her appearance started. ‘ When I started working there, I was always smart, but after a while I started dressing in more relaxed clothes, sometimes in jeans,’ says Miss Clarke.
‘One day I came in and Carolyn said: “Look at you in your dyke boots.” Then to everyone else, she said: “Jen has her dyke boots on today.”
‘ I was absolutely mortified — embarrassed rather than angry, so I just sat at my desk, kept my head down and tried to ignore it.
‘It was said in a jokey voice, and perhaps she didn’t realise it had upset me, but it’s moonshine for her to suggest we were all sitting around laughing and exchanging banter.’
Former MP Sian James told the jury Miss Clarke had raised the issue with her in 2013, upset over references to her clothing and the use of the word “dyke”, which she found offensive.
‘She was starting to feel it had gone beyond banter and it was causing her concern,’ she said, adding that the matter was addressed informally.
‘She (Mrs Harris) was very shocked. She was very concerned that these comments, made within the atmosphere of the office, had caused hurt to Jenny. Both of them were very keen that the issue was addressed.’
Certainly, Miss Clarke never considered leaving her job, believing the matter had been resolved.
She does not deny that Mrs Harris could be nice, too, giving her holidays in her mother’s caravan, a TV and a car — but she felt such kindnesses came with strings attached.
She says the favours left her feeling indebted and ‘manipulated’ into being at her boss’s ‘beck and call’ — offering to clean the caravan, mow lawns and build furniture for Mrs Harris’s son.
Then, in November 2014, came the alleged assault, which Miss Clarke says she is still struggling to understand. Mrs Harris insists the allegation is untrue. She believes it was made as a result of jealousy caused by her selection to succeed Mrs
James as the MP, after she stepped down in May 2015.
‘I was sitting at my desk typing, when Carolyn walked past and started rubbing my shoulders,’ claims Miss Clarke.
‘Suddenly I felt her hands grip my hair and start moving my head violently backwards and forwards. I screamed: “What are you doing? Get off!” I had to grip onto her hands to let go. It hurt like hell.
‘It was as if she just flipped. When I challenged her, she dropped to her knees and kept saying how sorry she was, and how she loved me more than her son. She just couldn’t explain it.
‘I wish I’d gone to the police then, but she was crying and seemed so sorry. It was Sian’s last few months as an MP before standing down, and I didn’t want to ruin things for her, so I decided to let it drop, but that night I couldn’t sleep I was in so much pain and had to hold ice packs to my head.’
Paulette Smith, a Labour councillor who worked in the office at the time of the alleged assault — or a disaffected former employee in the eyes of Mrs Harris — told the jury she had witnessed the alleged assault. She spoke of a ‘blood-curdling scream’ and seeing Mrs Harris’s hands, with tufts of Miss Clarke’s hair in them. ‘Jen was in agony,’ she said.
Nevertheless, when Mrs Harris was elected MP, Miss Clarke agreed to become office manager.
‘Carolyn’s ego went through the roof. Suddenly it felt like being in the Army. She wanted us to sign in, she wanted calls recorded, she wanted to know everything that was happening,’ says Miss Clarke.
‘one day I was sorting out pay rise forms for her, and Carolyn said to me: “Give yourself an extra £2,000 while you are at it,” so stupidly I took her at her word and did just that.
‘It wasn’t forgery, I didn’t try to copy Carolyn’s signature, I just wrote her name just as I’d done on countless other documents.’
Without telling her boss, Miss Clarke also reduced her hours to bring them in line with colleagues after noticing a discrepancy.
‘It was stupid, but I knew Ipsa would email Mrs Harris for confirmation and she’d see it then. She seemed fine with it. It was agreed I’d send the confirmation back.’ Mrs Harris denied this in court or authorising the pay rise. Demoted and then dismissed in January 2016, for unrelated matters, Miss Clarke lodged a grievance and decided to make a complaint to the police about the alleged assault two years earlier — but falling outside time limits, no action was taken.
Last weekend, the BBC reported that Jeremy Corbyn and First Minister Carwyn Jones were both fully supporting Mrs Harris.
BUT
some Labour members of the Welsh Assembly and senior party members are calling on her to quit — or for Mr Corbyn to suspend her from the frontbench — over the allegations.
She is also facing calls for a Labour investigation into the alleged assault.
National Executive Committee member John Lansman said last week: ‘I don’t believe that Carolyn Harris can continue as a frontbench spokesperson on equalities when she has been accused in open court with supportive evidence of having used homophobic language.
‘I think she needs to be removed from her role and in my view there must be an immediate investigation of the alleged assault.’
Welsh Government Environment Minister Hannah Blythyn, one of three LGBT politicians elected to the Assembly in 2016, said in a tweet: ‘It’s never banter — it’s homophobic language.’
In a statement released by Mrs Harris’s parliamentary office after Miss Clarke’s acquittal, the MP said: ‘When I uncovered evidence of wrongdoing in my office, I immediately reported it to the relevant authorities.
‘However, in this instance the jury found the case was not provable beyond reasonable doubt. It goes without saying that I respect the process of justice.’ But, as criticism mounted over her use of the word ‘ banter’ in her evidence, an apologetic Mrs Harris responded: ‘I understand that banter was an entirely inappropriate, indeed offensive, word to use.
‘I honestly do not remember making such a comment, and hearing it alleged in court struck me to the core.
‘It is a word that many LGBT people have heard to justify homophobic abuse for too long. And I apologise — unreservedly and unequivocally — for my use of it.’
Miss Clarke, who is still unemployed, is planning to lodge a complaint with Ipsa and the Labour Party, says: ‘ That’s all well and good, but where’s my apology?
‘For nine years I was loyal to Carolyn and kept quiet, but not any more. She has to go.’