Clarke bragged: whips are ‘clueless’
NOTHING sums up the Tory high command’s abject failure to rein in Mark Clarke than his showdown with two party heavyweights more than five years ago.
Conservative HQ was alarmed by reports that Clarke had got involved in a series of nasty incidents in Tooting, South London, where he was standing as parliamentary candidate against Labour’s Sadiq Khan in 2010.
Tory Chief Whip Patrick McLoughlin and party chairman Eric Pickles summoned Clarke, then barely 30 years old, for a dressing-down in McLoughlin’s Commons office.
It ended with Clarke running rings round them as the candidate exploited a mix-up over the date of one alleged fracas, letting him off the hook.
Clarke told them he was in church on the day in question – and later boasted to friends how he made mincemeat of ‘clueless’ McLoughlin and Pickles.
Clarke’s ability to escape scot-free is all the more surprising in view of the two men tasked with taking him down a peg.
Former miner McLoughlin is renowned for his no-nonsense approach to taming Tory troublemakers, and larger-than-life Yorkshireman Pickles does not suffer fools gladly.
Nor was Clarke intimidated by the Chief Whips’ office, where countless MPs caught misbehaving have been subjected to humiliating dressing-downs.
McLoughlin told him: ‘We have asked you here because we have heard very negative reports about you from your local constituency. You need to know we cannot tolerate this behaviour.’ Clarke: ‘What reports?’ Pickles: ‘I’ll lay it on the line, lad. They say you’re bone idle, you can’t be bothered to go campaigning on doorsteps, you’re more interested in appearing in gossip columns than on doorsteps, are downright rude to people, you drink too much and you have a poisonous relationship with your local association.’ Clarke: ‘They are all lying to you.’ McLoughlin: ‘We have heard these reports from several different people.’
Clarke: ‘I’m telling you, they’re all lying to you.’ Pickles: ‘They can’t all be wrong.’ When McLoughlin and Pickles
Right-wing political views were forged. Curiously, for someone with Caribbean blood, he became a fan of former Tory MP Enoch Powell, best known for his explosive ‘rivers of blood’ speech in the 1960s warning of the dangers of immigration.
A confidant of Clarke said: ‘I thought his love of Enoch odd considering his West Indian background but he never made a big deal out of that.
‘He often jokes, “I’m only black below the waist.”’
His mother was on a similarly upwardly mobile path as she became a highly successful therapist with celebrity clients and her own practice in Chelsea.
She once treated Rupert Young, twin brother of singer Will Young, after he self-harmed and twice tried to commit suicide.
Dr Clarke lives close to her son in a £1.5million house with her husband, hypnotherapist Patrick Bellville, a socialite whose former wife Lucinda Wallop is the daughter of Viscount Lymington and sister to the 10th Earl of Portsmouth, one of the richest aristocratic landowners in Hampshire.
Clarke’s Tory victims talk of his ‘mesmeric’ power to charm and manipulate others for his own twisted ends. It is as though he has inverted the psychological methods used by his mother’s profession to mend shattered lives to do precisely the opposite to his Conservative activist victims. Whereas a therapist identifies weakness and strengthens it, Clarke homes in on it and ruthlessly exploits it. He has told friends he had seen the terrible toll drink took on his father. Yet Clarke boasts of how he uses alcohol to lure women, his ‘IIP’ technique as he abhorrently and cockily calls it: ‘Isolate, inebriate and penetrate.’
It is hard not to ponder what a therapist would make of it, especially with a parental lineage such as Clarke’s.
After studying history at Durham University, Clarke was the party’s candidate for Tooting, the South London suburb where he now lives, by the time he was 30.
His path to the Cabinet looked clear. Then he lost in disgrace at the 2010 Election after his girlfriend, a local nurse, accused him of ‘appalling’ behaviour towards her. She said he told her he once slept with a friend’s girlfriend to get revenge on him. The warning lights continued to flash: after the 2010 Election, Tory chairman Baroness Warsi refused to put him back on the candidates list. Clarke responded with one of his favourite ploys: smears. He launched a vicious and cowardly social media vendetta against her, petulantly telling friends that Muslim Warsi was a ‘closet Communist and terrorist sympathiser’.
His reaction in recent months as victims finally summoned up the courage to expose him provides another telling psychological case book.
Like a cornered beast he launched a frenzy of attacks on them in a doomed attempt to muzzle them all. When one, Elliott Johnson, killed himself, the Party could sweep the ‘Tatler Tory’ scandal under the carpet no longer. Exposed to the world as a bully, blackmailer and worse, master manipulator Clarke tried to play the victim himself, claiming he was being targeted for trying to expose ‘endemic drug taking’ in the Party.
When this newspaper put a dozen allegations to him last week, including a brief and polite query as to whether he had gone to Barbados, he played the race card.
He said: ‘I am with my black West Indian mother visiting my black West Indian family. I can’t control my ethnicity, I was born with it. There’s a word for people who run stories about people based on their ethnicity.’
His mind games never sounded so feeble or transparent.