A former councillor close to Tony Newman and Simon Hall and a friend of cabinet minister Steve Reed are among those due in court next month following a lengthy police investigation. By STEVEN DOWNES
Court date: Joel ‘Bodger’ Bodmer (right) was known to be close to Croydon MP Steve Reed, now a member of Keir Starmer’s cabinet
Joel “Bodger” Bodmer and former Fieldway councillor Carole Bonner are among four people who have been charged with conspiracy and computer misuse in relation to irregularities surrounding Labour’s 2023 candidate selection process for the Croydon East parliamentary seat.
Bodmer, who worked closely with local MP Steve Reed on Croydon campaigning in 2021 and 2022, is also charged with perverting the course of justice in relation to allegedly altering phone records.
The Met handed its case files to the Crown Prosecution Service in September last year, but news of the criminal charges was only released today – just as postal ballots for the May 7 local elections were dropping on to doormats across the borough.
Labour is already mired in the Mandelson appointment scandal, which might yet bring down the Prime Minister, so the timing of these criminal charges will further damage the prospects of the party’s 2026 local election candidates, including Rowenna Davis, who is standing to become Croydon Mayor.
Inside Croydon broke the story almost three years ago of how Bodmer, seeking to be selected for the safe Labour parliamentary seat of Croydon East, had been implicated in altering the local party’s membership database in order to confer some advantage in the ballot.
Bonner was the local party official in charge of membership and the selection process at the time. Bonner had long been a supporter of Labour’s discredited leader, Tony Newman, and had been a ward colleague of Siimon Hall, the former cabinet member for finance who was at the centre of the council’s bankruptcy in 2020.
Charged: Carole Bonner was a Croydon Labour apologist who worked closely with her ward colleague, Simon Hall
In common with many CLPs – Constituency Labour Parties – the new Croydon East CLP used the Anonyvoter online voting system to conduct the selection – a system that has been shown to be easy to manipulate.
Anonyvoter is a product provided free-of-charge to the Labour Party by the family business of Maddie Henson, a Labour councillor in Addiscombe East.
Today it was announced that Bonner, 69, Bodmer, 40, as well as Shila Bodmer, 41 and Gabriel Leroy, 24, have been charged, with a court appearance next month.
All but Leroy, who is from Southwark, have addresses in Croydon. Leroy is a former Labour councillor in Southend, an area where Bodmer is thought to have considered seeking selection for public office.
Scotland Yard this morning issued the following statement to Inside Croydon:: “Four people have been charged with computer misuse offences following a Met investigation.
“The Crown Prosecution Service has authorised charges against four people after an investigation by the Met’s Cyber Crime Unit into allegations that a Labour Party database was manipulated to increase a candidate’s chances of selection in Croydon.”
The Met said that the four have been charged with conspiracy to commit an offence contrary to Section 1(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977 and Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
Bodmer works as an organiser with the Unison trade union.
Bonner was imposed as the Croydon East CLP secretary by Labour’s London region, rather than being elected by local members. This was at a time when Labour’s London region was being run by Pearleen Sangha, a long-time associate of Morgan McSweeney, the discredited former chief of staff in Downing Street. Sangha now works at HM Treasury, as Rachel Reeves’s “business advisor”.
In the dock: former Labour councillor in Southend Gabriel Leroy
In the autumn of 2023, Inside Croydon had reported how “Bodger” Bodmer had been given access to the supposedly confidential CLP membership list even before the selection process was declared open, in a clear breach of the rules.
Allegations of some kind of “inside job” continued into November 2023, with veteran political journalist Michael Crick reporting “suspected fraud” and “allegations of large-scale tampering with membership lists” in Croydon East’s selection.
“Several complaints already made to Labour national and London region HQs, especially over use of online votes,” Crick revealed.
Other candidates filed formal objections when it emerged that the 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…
Eventually, the Labour Party itself confirmed that an internal investigation had found that there had been an attempt at electoral fraud in Croydon East. The party reported itself to the Information Commissioner over the compromising of the personal data of around 600 members in the constituency.
Bonner was suspended from the party, pending the internal and police investigations.
When selection resumed in March 2024, now overseen by Labour regional officials, Bodmer was no longer among the candidates. He claimed that he withdrew because his personal circumstances had changed, and he wanted to avoid exposing himself or his family to a “distressing level of abuse”.
It’s now become a good deal clearer what those changes of personal circumstances really were.
When the selection meeting was finally staged, Natasha Irons was declared Labour’s candidate for the Croydon East parliamentary seat (which she duly won in July 2024). Labour London region officials never released any details of how members had voted.
Bodmer, Bonner and the two other defendants will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday May 19, by which time, “Bodger’s” pursuit of his own personal ambitions, aided by others in positions of power within the party, may well have helped towards another Labour defeat in local Croydon elections.
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: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
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