I once heard Mark Clarke charm a cash machine. “Thank you so much,” the young Tory candidate murmured instinctively to the ATM as it presented him with his money. A charismatic figure known to have a sharp temper, Clarke was one of his party’s young meteors, singled out by Tatler for future greatness.
Yet it was not to be. Having failed to wrest Tooting from Sadiq Khan in 2010, Clarke was removed from the candidates’ list – busying himself instead with the party’s RoadTrip campaign to bus young activists around the country, and its youth wing, Conservative Future. During the coalition years, his mercurial behaviour increasingly got the better of him and his reputation for volatility and aggression progressively overshadowed his undoubted talents.
Rumours circulated of campaigning rigour tipping over into the outright persecution of vulnerable individuals. When his fellow activist, Elliott Johnson, killed himself last September, having claimed that Clarke and others had bullied him, the Tatler Tory’s political career was ended in the most shocking fashion imaginable (Clarke insists that the allegations are wholly untrue and declined to take part in the subsequent inquiry).
Clifford Chance’s report on the scandal, published on the Conservative party website, has already been condemned by Johnson’s father, Ray, as a “whitewash”. As so often, however, the detail is more damning than the headline conclusions.
Yes, the inquiry declares that Grant Shapps, the co-chairman of the party when the alleged incidents took place, and many of his senior colleagues, were not “aware of allegations of bullying or harassment of young activists by Mr Clarke or those associated with him prior to the 14 August 2015 complaint”. But paragraph nine of the report’s summary refers to an earlier meeting on 18 June 2014, between Shapps, his chief of staff Paul Abbott, and Clarke: “Mr Clarke’s candidate file did not include allegations of bullying or harassment of young activists. It did include reports of aggressive and bullying conduct towards his campaign director and negative media coverage about his political and personal activities from four years earlier.” If ever there was a distinction without a difference, this is it.
As a legal firm, Clifford Chance has – quite correctly – concerned itself solely with hard evidence. But the authors of the report also invite the reader, by heavy implication, to ask whether the top brass at Conservative HQ was quite as ignorant of Clarke’s alleged behaviour as the official record suggests. They certainly knew what kind of personality they were dealing with: as Shapps told the party’s campaign chief, Lynton Crosby, on 13 August 2014, Clarke was a “difficult individual who delivered”.
In contrast, alleged victims were not given the benefit of the doubt. When Abbott met one complainant, he concluded that the allegation “sounded quite bad” but that the individual was not a “hugely reliable” witness. It is hard not to conclude that, until tragedy struck, the party was prepared to turn a blind eye to Clarke’s alleged misconduct as long as he remained a political asset.
A generation ago, such behaviour would scarcely have merited a report in the patriarchal jungle of Conservative politics. But the transparency of contemporary culture has made the habits of the bully harder to conceal. More to the point, no modern organisation that aspires to represent today’s citizens can be seen to tolerate such emotional savagery. The Tories would be gravely mistaken if they imagine that this case is closed.
Patrick McLoughlin, the Tory chairman, has already declared that “there can be no place for bullying behaviour in our party, and we all have a responsibility to act when it occurs”. But Theresa May should reinforce this message, too. She, after all, was the first senior Tory to address the perception that the Conservatives are the “nasty party”. On her return from holiday, the PM should seek an opportunity to respond vigorously and unambiguously to this especially nasty chapter in her party’s history.
