How top lawyers were used to hide the truth about his Labour lover
THE KEY to McCluskey’s hold over Labour during the Corbyn years was a flame-haired former nurse from Glasgow named Karie Murphy.
Formerly deputy leader tom Watson’s office manager, the Unite loyalist was made Corbyn’s chief-of-staff in 2016 and went on to ‘mastermind’, if that is the word, the party’s last General Election campaign.
What the public was not told then was that Ms Murphy wasn’t just the trade union boss’s protegee. She was also his lover.
In other words, ‘Red Len’ was both bankrolling Her Majesty’s Opposition and sleeping with its senior strategist.
‘the media, desperate for a way to undermine Corbyn, constantly threatened to expose that we were involved,’ McCluskey writes.
‘We had no intention of providing them with that ammunition, so we engaged the press in a game of cat and mouse, getting [Unite official] Howard Beckett to use his legal genius to knock out gossipy stories.
‘We wanted our relationship to be kept private, away from the public gaze.’ this ‘legal genius’ revolved around issuing barefaced denials. In March 2015, the Mail’s Andrew Pierce reported that Murphy was Unite’s favoured Labour candidate for Halifax. ‘McCluskey and Murphy — who is separated from her husband — are very close friends,’ he wrote. ‘Some people in the Labour movement have asked, rightly or wrongly, if they are more than just friends.’
In response, McCluskey paid for law firm Carter Ruck to send a letter threatening to sue for libel. ‘the article is highly defamatory of our client, alleging as it does that he is in engaged in a clandestine sexual relationship with Karie Murphy which is improperly governing his actions, and in consequence those of Unite, towards the Labour Party,’ it read.
‘As well as being highly defamatory of our client, these allegations are also entirely untrue.’
Confident of our sources, the Mail did not respond and refused to remove the article from its website. We did not hear from Carter Ruck again on the matter.
A year later, the New Statesman magazine was strong-armed into changing a profile of the Unite boss that described Murphy as his ‘partner’. Instead, they agreed to use the phrase ‘close friend’.
Unite continued to deny a relationship for years, even as sightings emerged of the couple at a string of expensive restaurants, drinking at a five-star hotel in Madrid prior to the 2019 Champions League final, and her leaving his £800,000 Unite-subsidised flat near London’s Borough Market. One New Year’s Eve, they were even pictured holding hands in a hotel bar in Scotland.
BUT when the Mail asked Unite for comment, McCluskey’s ‘legal genius’ Mr Beckett threatened to sue.
‘The claims Len McCluskey shared a room with Karie Murphy are untrue, vexatious and malicious and intended to cause harm to these characters,’ he stated. ‘they are defamatory and, if printed in the form suggested by your questions, will result in litigation.’
It’s unclear why a Union spokesman was used to suppress the story, or on what grounds Unite believed that represented a legitimate use of its resources.
This week, leadership candidate Gerard Coyne called for it to come clean about the affair, saying: ‘Many members will be asking if their money has been spent in playing legal “cat and mouse” with the media. that is why I have called for transparency on all Unite spending.’
The Press aren’t the only ones McCluskey has led on a merry dance with regard to his romantic life. the memoir sees him admit to ‘many regrets’ and confessing: ‘I am sorry for hurting people who simply didn’t deserve to be hurt. I wish I could turn back the clock.’
He describes himself as the father of four children, by four different women. the eldest, Ian, a Unite organiser, is the product of his 25year marriage to his first wife Ann.
Calum, a computer programmer born in 1991 is the result of an affair with a union colleague named Jennie Sandle, now known as Jennie Formby. (Coincidentally she was much later hired as the £75,000-ayear Political Director of McCluskey’s Unite, before becoming General Secretary of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party).
Calum was three when McCluskey divorced Ann — and then promptly moved another lover, Paula Lace, into his union-subsidised London home. A third child, Victoria, was born in 1997.
By 2007, McClusky had taken up with Alicia Forde — an NHS nurse he is believed to have married in the Caribbean.
In the memoir, he says he has a son called Frankie as the result of that relationship.
‘I certainly didn’t spend as much time with my children as I should have done when they were young,’ writes McCluskey.
‘I only hope they can forgive me.’