Lethal vow of bullying victim’s shattered parents: We’ll nail the b******s
THE parents of the Tory activist who killed himself after being bullied by a senior Election aide to David Cameron have vowed to nail the ‘bastards’ his son blamed for his suicide.
Ray and Alison Johnson pledged to win justice for their son Elliott, 21, who was physically and mentally abused by Tory director Mark Clarke, head of the Prime Minister’s ‘Road Trip’ campaign.
And they want to know why Conservative chiefs failed to protect Elliott despite warnings about Clarke’s thuggish behaviour going back years.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday at their elegant but modestly furnished Georgian home in Wisbech in the Cambridgeshire Fens, Mr and Mrs Johnson told of their agony at losing their ‘lovely, bright and brave’ son. He was found dead by a railway track after being targeted by burly Clarke, 37, and his Conservative henchmen.
While grieving, businessman Mr Johnson, 57, has spent much of the eight weeks since Elliott’s death diligently piecing together the events that led to his suicide. Convinced the Tory Party is trying to cover up the truth to protect senior figures, Mr Johnson is conducting his own investigation in parallel to police inquiries. He is convinced he is fulfilling his son’s last wish and his own dossier of evidence includes damning letters and emails from Elliott’s computer.
‘If Elliott had wanted to commit suicide all he had to do was eat a couple of peanuts: he was allergic to them. It would have killed him straight away. It makes me think he wanted to go out in a big way. I am convinced he decided if he was going to go down he would take Clarke and the other bastards with him.’
IT IS an uncharacteristic flash of rage from Mr Johnson, who, like his son is unassuming, intelligent and decent. But also like his son, Mr Johnson’s quiet voice masks a steely core. ‘Elliott was only 5ft 4in but he always stood up for himself,’ says Mr Johnson. ‘He loved playing rugby at school and wanted to be at the forefront of everything.’
In their search for the truth, the couple endured a harrowing ordeal, scrolling through their son’s computer entries in the days and hours leading up to his death.
They discovered how he had returned from a Tory event at the Commons on September 14 and starting trawling the internet for ways of committing suicide.
Eventually, he located an aerial photograph of an isolated railway track at Sandy, Bedfordshire, 50 miles from his family home, where he killed himself the next day.
‘He turned his computer off at
6.15pm to go out – until then he’d been looking at normal political stuff. He came back from the Commons at about 11.30pm and within minutes he was searching for ways to commit suicide,’ said Mr Johnson. ‘He looked at various methods – poisoning and others – and eventually settled on railways. He obviously decided “that’s the way I’m going to go.”
‘He wore a smart shirt and tie and waistcoat – he loved wearing a waistcoat,’ says Mrs Johnson. ‘He was so smart he took four suits to university,’ she smiles.
‘He had his Loake leather shoes on too, didn’t he?’ interjects her husband fondly.
‘He put a blue towel between the tracks to lie on. I suppose he didn’t want to get wet,’ Mrs Johnson continues. ‘When I saw his body in the coffin he was perfect. The only damage was to his head.’
‘We think he lifted his head at the last minute,’ says Mr Johnson, faltering. Mrs Johnson glances up at her husband as the undemonstrative English couple hold back their tears.
As meticulous as his keen historian dad, Elliott left three suicide notes: a moving apology to his parents and two sisters, and a double-edged message to ‘friends and allies’.
The third – to unnamed ‘bullies and betrayers’ – is the shortest and most telling. It says: ‘I could write a hate message. But actions speak louder than words. I was never one for hate anyway. But I think this should be on your mind.’
Rarely has a boyish 21-year-old’s scrawled suicide note been composed with such poetic and political potency. Mr Johnson says Elliott never showed any signs of depression. Quite the reverse: only two months earlier he graduated from Nottingham University and achieved his dream, a job in London as political editor of the Conservative Way Forward magazine. But for all his pluck, Elliott was never going to be a match for ruthless and charismatic manipulator Clarke, nearly twice his size and age. The word most use to describe Elliott is ‘sweet’; for Clarke it is usually ‘nasty’ – or much worse. One of his closest friends called him a ‘narcissistic sociopath’.
‘Elliott was a lovely boy – bright but a softie,’ says Mrs Johnson. Glancing up at her husband, she adds: ‘He had your brains and my emotions.’
Elliott’s idealism and warmth is mirrored by a photograph he clutched to him when he died: a grainy black-and-white picture of his grandfather, also called Ray, smiling while at work on a building site.
Mr Johnson explains: ‘My dad died long before Elliott was born but for some reason he idolised him. I think it was because Dad was a working man who always voted Tory. Elliott loved that. He was Elliott’s working-class hero. He had two photos of my dad and treasured them more than anything.’ When Elliott died and one of the two photos was missing from his London flat, Mr Johnson knew where it would be.
‘I asked the police if they had found an old photo by the railway track. When they said they hadn’t I asked them to look again.’ They did, and there it was, a few feet from where Elliott had died.
HIS passion for politics first surfaced as a teenager at Spalding Grammar School. In 2010 he won a mock election as the Tory candidate, thrashing rivals with 80 per cent of the vote.
‘People used to say he was our very own William Hague,’ smiles Mrs Johnson.
Five years later, Elliott’s gift for writing and campaigning was put to good use by the Tories in a real Election campaign. He was part of the party’s social media campaign team and impressed chairman Lord Feldman and chief strategist Lynton Crosby.
The Johnsons say they will not be satisfied until those who they believe led their son to take his own life are not just thrown out of the Tory Party but face criminal prosecution.
If the Conservatives and police fail to do so, they say they will consider launching a private prosecution. They say they owe it to their ‘sweet’, tragic son.