Bully boy with a ‘First Mother’ complex
OF ALL the many women in Mark Clarke’s life, none is more important than his mother, Dr Madeleine Clarke, a therapist and psychologist with her own private practice.
The 38-year-old aide is accused of assaulting, threatening and blackmailing his many lovers, but he holds ‘The First Mother’, as he calls her in mock adoration, in awe.
A former girlfriend said: ‘Mark has a fixation with his mother and she worships him. She is forever telling him he is the most wonderful man in the world.
‘Anything she says goes. She is the only person he is frightened of. She religiously keeps all his press cuttings. I believe that is where many of his problems come from.’
By contrast, Clarke had such a low regard for his father, accountant Dennis Ogden, that he changed his surname by deed poll from Ogden to Clarke after his parents split up when he was a young man.
A male friend of Clarke said: ‘Mark told me he couldn’t stand his father. He claimed he had left him on a bus once when he was a baby and said his father was virtually an alcoholic.’
Elegant Madeleine’s Barbadian roots can be seen in her son’s matinee idol looks.
Her father Carlos ‘Bertie’ Clarke, was a West Indian Test cricketer who came to the UK in the 1940s, became a GP in Pimlico and was awarded the OBE in 1983.
Until he was seven, Clarke lived with his mother on the Ivybridge council estate in Hounslow, West London. Despite his impressive family pedigree, he made the most of his humble background to promote his political ambition, portraying himself as a John Major-style ‘working-class’ Tory.
In 2007, he said: ‘My family is a very working-class family. Every- one was born in a council house, and after working hard all their life everyone died poor in that same council house.’
It is hardly surprising it was not a portrait that ‘Tatler Tory’ Clarke’s friends were familiar with.
They knew him as the wellspoken and ambitious boy who won a scholarship to Dulwich College, where fees currently cost nearly £20,000 a year, and whose former pupils include PG Wodehouse, Nigel Farage and 12 Years A Slaveactor Chiwetel Ejiofor.
It was at Dulwich that Clarke’s
referred to a specific incident, Clarke demanded that they provide the date. The Tory grandees fell straight into his trap by tentatively producing one.
A triumphant Clarke declared: ‘According to my diary, that is a Sunday gentlemen. I couldn’t have been there.’ McLoughlin: ‘Why?’ Clarke: ‘I was at church.’ A dumbfounded Pickles spluttered: ‘You? At church? What were you doing there, lad?’
A beaming Clarke said: ‘Making myself a better man.’
When McLoughlin and Pickles maintained they did not believe him, Clarke said: ‘I can produce 50 people who will testify that I was there.’
After getting away scot-free in the farcical confrontation, Clarke couldn’t wait to tell his friends.
One said: ‘He said they made a total mess of it. He thought it was hilarious and said they were a couple of clueless twits.’