It was a typical evening in London for me when my mobile started to buzz. I
was a guest at a human rights function hosted by the campaign group Reprieve
at the offices of a City of London firm of solicitors, listening to
released Guantanamo Bay hostages talk about their experiences with Jon Snow
at the helm. I checked my messages and it was Ray Ruddock, my builder. He
had been doorstepped by a Sunday newspaper journalist who was asking
questions about his donations to the Labour Party.
Ray was one of four people who had given money to the Labour Party on my
behalf over the previous five years to help me keep my donations anonymous.
My secretary Janet Kidd, a local Labour Party member, had also been visited
by the journalist, and I had no doubt that he would soon track down the
other two intermediaries I had used: my solicitor John McCarthy and Janet
Dunn, the wife of my old friend and work colleague Tony.
Then I got a call from the project manager of the Durham Green Business Park,
a land development of mine creating up to 7,000 new jobs for the North East.
He had been approached by the same journalist. He was surprised to learn,
when I told him, that I was in fact a Labour activist and that I did make
donations but that I did not want this to become public knowledge. I have
always kept my business and political interests completely separate. The
sudden phone calls that evening set alarm bells ringing in my head. Perhaps
I was about to be unmasked as a Labour donor.
Also present at the Reprieve gathering was Jane Hogarth, a dynamic and highly
efficient organiser from the Labour Party fundraising department. I tipped
her off that the press were on the scent and she made a call to her boss
Peter Watt, Labour’s General Secretary, to let him know that questions were
being asked of my intermediaries about possible irregular payments into
party funds. As far as we were concerned, this was no big story; we had done
no wrong, the press were clearly still floundering as to who the source of
the funds was and no one was giving the game away. But how would the story
run? And how big would it run that Sunday?
Frantic to-ing and fro-ing throughout the Friday and Saturday took place.
Solicitors were consulted, records checked and statutes examined. We finally
managed to put together a conference call at 2am on Sunday morning between
my solicitor, the Labour Party’s solicitor and Peter Watt, just as the first
stories of the donations were breaking. We thought we were on firm legal
ground but agreed nonetheless to “regularise” the situation by declaring the
donations in my name. But by then it was too late. The news had broken.
The story of my involvement in anonymous donations goes back to 2001, when I
had attended a day conference as an executive member of Labour North with
party officials at Durham County Hall to learn about the new Elections &
Referendums Act 2000. I was probably the only activist there who was looking
at the Act from the donor’s viewpoint and I thought that the loss of
anonymity for donors giving more than £5,000 could be a deterrent. But then
I realised that there was (and is) nothing illegal about making political
donations through third parties.
When I gave money through intermediaries, the party fundraising team was
always aware that I was the original source of the funds and they always
checked with me that the donors were UK residents and on the electoral
register. It was a simple case of swapping cheques with my associates: I
paid them and they paid the same amount to the Labour Party once funds had
cleared their bank account. Nineteen donations were given in all worth more
than £600,000 over a five year period.
For several years while I was giving money to the Labour Party, I received
regular invitations to events at party conference. At Labour conference one
year at Blackpool, they seated me at dinner back to back with Bill Clinton,
and we were able to exchange a few words as he took the applause for a
speech which has left the audience in rapture. As he sat back down, I said,
"Now I know why everybody loves you, Bill." He raised his eyes to the
ceiling and said "Sometimes too much..."
Why was I so determined to remain an anonymous donor? I did not want to fall
out with my fellow party colleagues. It's as simple as that. Unlike most
other Labour donors, I had a life inside the party as an activist and
campaigner. To the best of my knowledge, I am the only high roller donor who
canvasses, runs committee rooms and handles local casework regularly.
I was brought up in a strong Labour family; my parents were both very long
serving members of Newcastle City Council who gave a lifetime of service to
the party and the community. My mother was quiet and intellectual, a former
professional violinist for Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and my father
was a larger than life character and proprietor of a large northern working
men's social club. I also served on Tyne and Wear County Council. To this
day, I get the fourth and fifth generations of people whose great
grandparents we originally helped knocking on my door asking for advice. I
had been on the Northern Executive of the Labour Party since Tony Blair was
selected as an MP in Sedgefield in 1982. And I had also seen the resentment
of many traditional Labour supporters to the way Tony Blair was now bringing
businessmen into the New Labour field.
I have often had to fight against class consciousness in the Labour Party.
People like Joan Maynard, the former Sheffield MP, who was known as Stalin's
grandmother on account of her hard left views, fought hard against my
parliamentary candidature for Richmond (North Yorkshire). She would attend
party meetings in headscarf, trousers and jumper and she would be the first
to denigrate the views of moderates such as myself. It was only after she
failed to stop me being selected as the candidate that she privately
welcomed me into her world of privilege at her double fronted Georgian manor
house set on an idyllic village green in Sowerby in the heart of James
Herriot country. Her maid served me coffee from a porcelain jug as she
reposed, hair coiffured, in a designer dress, her walls adorned with the art
of former Conservative Cabinet minister Nicholas Ridley.
I personally have always supported the New Labour project and Tony Blair's
drive to widen the party's appeal to the growing English middle class, but
that did not mean I was going to provoke my fellow activists by flashing my
cash around. That is not my style. I am not a 'money man'. I believe an
outward show of wealth is truly vulgar. I am an activist and a campaigner
who joined the Labour Party to further economic prosperity and social
justice for all.
