Three Croydon Labour Party activists – Joel Bodmer, his wife Shila Bodmer and former Fieldway councillor Carole Bonner – are to be tried on conspiracy and computer misuse charges, but will be forced to wait almost three years to make their case.
Long wait: Joel Bodmer has to wait until 2029 for trial
At Southwark Crown Court today, the three pleaded not guilty to a range of charges in connection with events surrounding the selection of a parliamentary candidate for Croydon East in 2023-2024.
A fourth Labour Party figure facing charges, Gabriel Leroy, 24, entered a guilty plea to conspiracy to commit an offence under the Criminal Law Act and the Computer Misuse Act .
Joel Bodmer, 40, Shila Bodmer, 41, and Carole Bonner, 69, all pleaded not guilty to the same charges.
Joel Bodmer also pleaded not guilty to the additional charge of perverting the course of justice in relation to allegedly altering phone records.
Leroy, who gave an address in Southwark, was the last of the accused to arrive in court, his lateness causing a brief delay to proceedings in Court 9, His Honour Judge Cole presiding.
Leroy had been a councillor in Southend until mid-2024, when he stepped down abruptly. It later emerged that he and the three other activists were suspended by the Labour Party pending the police investigation.
Joel Bodmer had arrived at court on his own.
Guilty plea: former Labour councillor in Southend Gabriel Leroy
In court today, it was alleged that Bodmer provided a PDF document and a Microsoft Excel file purporting to be his complete telephone records for a phone number, from which a telephone call to the Labour Party support team made on November 3 2023 had been deleted.
The defendants were told bail would continue and their next hearing will be on February 12, 2027.
A trial date was set for February 5, 2029 – more than five years since the alleged offences occurred.
Leroy will await sentencing until then.
“Bodger” Bodmer, who worked closely with local MP Steve Reed on Croydon campaigning in 2021 and 2022, had been among the candidates short-listed by Labour Party’s London region for the winnable Croydon East constituency. The selection process was halted in 2023 after whistleblowers filed urgent complaints over data irregularities.
Inside Croydon broke the story almost three years ago of how the local party’s membership database had been manipulated, apparently 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 Simon Hall, the former cabinet member for finance who was at the centre of the council’s bankruptcy in 2020.
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.
Labour choice: Carole Bonner was imposed as secretary at Croydon East CLP
In April this year, Scotland Yard 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.
Joel Bodmer works as an organiser with the Unison trade union. Though not suspended from his job, he has been on a prolonged period of unpaid leave.
In 2023, as Labour prepared itself for the General Election and working within new constituency boundaries, 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 autumn of 2023, Inside Croydon reported how the supposedly confidential CLP membership list had been made available to one candidate 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…
Anonyvoter: Joel Bodmer was close to Croydon Labour leaders, including Maddie Henson, behind the company that supplied the party with its online voting system
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.
At the time, 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”.
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.
Read more: Vote-rigging accused Bonner tried to shut down this news site
Read more: Labour admits serious breach of private data in Croydon East
More Reed: Reed group fined for slow declaration of £800,000 donations
Read more: #TheLabourFiles: MP Reed, Evans and the Croydon connection
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What a sorry state of affairs.