LABOUR SCANDAL: Senior figures in the local party face an anxious wait to discover whether they will be charged over attempts to fiddle the 2023 parliamentary members’ ballot. By WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor
The Daily Torygraph is reporting this morning that the Metropolitan Police has passed a file to the Crown Prosecution Service over the alleged criminal attempt by some Croydon Labour figures to fix the parliamentary selection in Croydon East.
Inside Croydon reported extensively about the circumstances which led the Met to launch a probe into the use of the Anonyvoter voting system and dodgy email accounts in late 2023 and into the following spring. Natasha Irons was eventually selected by party members, and in July last year she was elected as the first MP for the new constituency.
But that was only after another of the candidates, Joel “Bodger” Bodmer, dropped out of the selection race once the Old Bill turned up, and with some senior local Labour officials quietly moved aside from the process.
Drop out: Joel ‘Bodger’ Bodmer (right) was known to be close to Croydon MP Steve Reed, now a member of Starmer’s cabinet
One, Carole Bonner, a former Croydon councillor and one of the Newman Numpties who ran the council from 2014 to 2018, has subsequently vanished from all local party activities and WhatsApp groups. At the time, Bonner was the interim chair of the Croydon East CLP, appointed by Labour’s London region.
Another, lawyer Melanie Felton, has recently been “selected” to stand as a council candidate in South Norwood at next year’s local elections. Felton was Croydon East’s CLP secretary at the time of the alleged vote-rigging.
The CLP treasurer at the time, also appointed by London region, was Mark Henson, the co-director of the company that supplied the Anonyvoter voting system to the Labour Party.
No one has been charged by the Met in relation to the vote-rigging, which the Labour Party has admitted occurred. Labour in fact reported itself to the Information Commissioner’s Office over the data breaches. And in March 2023, Labour confirmed that an internal investigation by party officials had found that there had been an attempt at electoral fraud in Croydon East.
There is no certainty that the lengthy investigation by Scotland Yard’s cyber crime unit will lead to the CPS agreeing that anyone is charged with an offence.
But this CPS development is the latest step in a long-running saga of law-breaking by senior figures within the Labour Party in Croydon.
That includes the illegal hacking of this website’s email and Twitter accounts, Croydon councillors failing to declare their business interests as required by law – and one of them still landing a five-figure council grant, and senior figures implicated in the non-declaration of £800,000 in donations to a shadowy group which conspired to get Keir Starmer installed as party leader and, ultimately, Prime Minister.
Out next month: Paul Holden’s book has already led to the resignation of a senior Downing Street staffer
The latter episode is meticulously recounted in a new book, The Fraud, by investigative journalist Paul Holden, which is due for publication next month.
The book’s shocking revelations are already thought to have brought about the resignation a fortnight ago of Paul Ovenden, Starmer’s director of political strategy, who was shown to have exchanged inappropriate sexually explicit messages about MP Diane Abbott.
Today’s Torygraph report, published on the eve of the Labour Party annual conference in Liverpool, focuses on Pearleen Sangha, now Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s business adviser, but who in 2023-2024 was Labour’s London region director.
This placed Sangha notionally in charge of the Croydon East parliamentary selection two years ago. Or, as the Torygraph would have it, “embroiled in a criminal investigation over alleged vote-rigging”.
The newspaper describes Sangha as “an ally of Morgan McSweeney, the No10 chief of staff”. McSweeney features prominently in the Holden book.
The Torygraph reports: “The Treasury declined to say whether [Chancellor] Ms Reeves was aware that Ms Sangha had overseen a selection subject to a live criminal investigation before she got the job.”
That Sangha was not involved in the alleged misconduct and was not a focus of the Met’s investigations is admitted in the seventh paragraph of the report: “There is no suggestion Ms Sangha is personally being investigated by police, but, as the party’s regional director, she was in charge of overseeing the selection process.”
Which is true, but a bit of a stretch.
According to Inside Croydon sources, the Torygraph’s report has “No real new info”, beyond what this website was reporting almost two years ago. They added that although it seemed clear that Sangha wanted Bodmer to win the selection, they doubted that she was involved in the data manipulation.
Today, Inside Croydon approached the winning Croydon East selection candidate, Natasha Irons MP, but she was travelling to Liverpool and unavailable for comment.
Headline news: two years since this website reported the dodgy goings on at a Croydon CLP, the national press have gone large on the story. Though ’emboiled’ is a bit of a stretch
The Torygraph report rehashes much of what veteran political reporter Michael Crick, Inside Croydon and others have had in the public domain for two years or more.
Anonyvoter is a piece of software used to conduct online votes.
David Evans, previously a leading figure in Croydon Labour and a former councillor, procured the use of Anonyvoter for use in all party selections when he was appointed by Starmer as Labour General Secretary. Evans did so without ever going to competitive tender.
Anonyvoter is a product of Henson IT Solutions Ltd, which is run by Addiscombe couple Mark and Maddie Henson. That’s the same Mark Henson who was CLP treasurer at the time of the Croydon East selections.
Pirate outfits: Cllr Maddie Henson and husband Mark Henson run the company that supplies Anonyvoter to the Labour Party
Maddie Henson is a Newman Numpty, and has been a councillor for what is now Addiscombe East ward since 2014.
There are clear and glaring flaws in the way Anonyvoter has been used over the past couple of years, making it an ideal tool for any malevolent characters wishing to manipulate the outcome of a vote. Anonyvoter will have been used in virtually all Labour’s selections for parliamentary candidates who stood at the July 2024 General Election.
Local party officials – it doesn’t need a London region high-flyer – who administer the selection with Anonyvoter can add votes without trouble – even during the process or after the advertised end of the poll. They can see who has voted, and who hasn’t.
It was notable in several parliamentary selections – including in Croydon East – that the actual number of votes cast was never revealed, which as well as smelling dead dodgy, is deeply anti-democratic.
In Croydon East, the membership lists had been fiddled with: with a total membership at the time of close to 600, at least 120 members had their data – address, phone number or email address – tampered with, and it was reckoned that 30 votes were fraudulently cast by email and without members’ knowledge.
It was alleged that one candidate (guess who) had somehow been given early access (by whom?) to the vital membership lists, to give them a head start in canvassing members for their support. Disadvantaged selection candidates filed formal objections when it emerged that the “official” members’ data that they were provided with was full of errors.
On one list, 71 members had their home address changed compared to a list from earlier in 2023; 26 had their phone number changed; 40 members had been given a “new” email addresses – potentially very handy when it comes to remote voting in a tightly contested selection…
In control: Labour’s London region officials – including Pearleen Sangha, with the mic on the stage – ran Croydon East’s long-delayed selection meeting. Neither Carole Bonner nor Joel Bodmer were in attendance that day in March 2024
As the Torygraph accurately reports today: “It triggered a wave of allegations that the selection process had been stitched up in favour of a particular candidate.”
The newspaper reports: “A CPS spokesman said: ‘We have received a file of evidence from the Metropolitan Police Service in relation to the Labour Party selection process for a candidate to represent the Croydon East constituency’.”
And: “A Met spokesman said: ‘We have received allegations of computer misuse in relation to an internal selection process for a political party in Croydon during October and November 2023. The Met’s cybercrime team are investigating, and inquiries are ongoing’.”
It is, of course, entirely possible that the CPS decides not to pursue any charges over the Croydon East attempted criminal stitch-up.
Keir Starmer is a former Director of Public Prosecutions.
Read more: Labour admits serious breach of private data in Croydon East
More Reed: Reed group fined for slow declaration of £800,000 donations
More Reed: Now Labour suspends selections in MP Steve Reed’s backyard
Read more: Council pays £10,000 grant to councillor’s undeclared business
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
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Hopefully this Bodger guy does prison time for his contempt of democracy, it would be refreshing for someone that has made the Labour Party look dodgy actually be held properly accountable for once.