The election campaign leaflet that helped to end David Abrahams’s brief and ignominious political career carried a banner headline: Who Is This Man?

It was a contest for a council seat in Newcastle-upon-Tyne that took place 26 years ago, but the question holds good today.

Mr Abrahams, unmasked four days ago as the man who secretly gave Labour more than £600,000 through intermediaries, is a walking paradox.

This is the man of the shadows who craves admiration, the eccentric who built a multimillion-pound property portfolio, the recluse who never misses a chance to shake hands with the political elite.

He has homes in an affluent suburb of Newcastle and on the edge of Regent’s Park, North London, yet lives so unostentatiously that many who thought that they knew him have been amazed to learn of his wealth.

A self-styled “serial philanthropist” with many acquaintances but few friends, Mr Abrahams, who is single, has voiced outrage that anyone would suspect an ulterior motive for his covert gifts to Labour. He says he has been made to feel “like a criminal and a murderer” and is threatening legal action at the first published hint that his hidden generosity was a calculated attempt to swap cash for favours.

Yet this is a man, it has emerged, with a lengthy track record of concealing the truth about the most basic facts of his life, including his name, his age and his marital status. How did he think he could get away with it?

A clue may lie in the nudge-wink politics of local government in 1960s Newcastle, where Mr Abrahams came to adulthood in a family well on its way to forming a minor Labour dynasty. The young David’s parents were both Labour councillors and one of his uncles was a Labour MP. David’s father, Bennie, described by a former colleague as “a colourful, larger than life character with a name that could open doors”, joined the council in the late 1950s and would eventually become the city’s Lord Mayor.

His mother, Marion, represented the same ward as her husband. It seemed only natural that their son should follow in their footsteps. In 1977 he became a Labour county councillor for the same St Anthony’s ward in which his parents were city councillors. A former party colleague said: “It was the safest Labour seat on the council. Or at least it was, until he managed to lose it four years later.”

The Who Is This Man? leaflet which helped to undermine Mr Abrahams’s bid for reelection followed the Lib Dems’ discovery that their opponent was using a different name – David Martin – for his business dealings in the city. It is a habit that Mr Abrahams has continued and which he has explained as stemming – entirely legitimately – from his father’s desire to distance his own political name from his son’s business activities.

His political ambition undimmed, by 1990 Mr Abrahams hoped to represent Labour in Westminster by challenging William Hague in the North Yorkshire seat of Richmond.

An official of the constituency Labour party recalls that Mr Abrahams, a member of the party’s Fabian Society, arived for the selection meeting in Northallerton with a woman and an 11-year-old who were introduced as his wife and son.

He won the three-way contest and duly approved a press release introducing Labour’s new candidate which stated that he lived “in Gosforth, Newcastle, with his wife Anthea and son”.

Six months later a woman called Anthea Bailey revealed to a local newspaper that she had “a business arrangement” with Mr Abrahams under which she had agreed to pose as his wife. In return, he had promised to pay off her debts.

Labour officials also learnt that Mr Abrahams was 46, not 41, as he had claimed. Today he tries, even on official documents, to pass himself off as 53. He was born in 1944, not 1954. After a protracted dispute, he was deselected. By 2007, the small-time landlord had established himself as a wealthy property developer and the failed local councillor had gained such influence in Labour circles that he was awarded a place in the front row of a hand-picked audience for Tony Blair’s farewell to the Sedgefield faithful.

Behind the business success lies a string of companies. He is a listed director of some. Others feature only some of proxy donors in whose names he has, during the past four years, handed over £600,000 to Labour.

A former Labour politician in the North East who has known Mr Abrahams since he was a teenager, said that he had always been regarded as an eccentric. “He likes to think of himself as a bit of a power broker, mixing with the great and good, but he has never had any real influence.”

A Labour veteran suggests that Mr Abrahams has spent most of his life trying to live up to his father’s expectations. He succeeded in business but perhaps could never came to terms with his status as a political lightweight. Secrecy has become a way of life for Mr Abrahams, he believes, as has using others as a shield.

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