Now that a blog has run with part of the story I think that CF members unaware of the full story deserve to be told it. CF Diary can reveal that the Party's "Youth Development Manager" has approached long-standing activist and Castaway star Clare Hilley offering Party resources for a campaign to get her elected Chairman of CF instead of the other, long-standing candidates.
I've been following this since before Christmas in the hope that the Manager
would backtrack, apologise, or be disciplined
internally. Instead, there has been continued deception on his part, and in the last week a Party Board investigation into the matter quietly concluded by telling him off for "the suggestion" that he had acted wrongly. In writing this report I've spent longer analysing the complexities of CF internal politics than I would usually care to, but it's important that it is made clear that this behaviour is absolutely unacceptable.
In November, being completely new to the CF scene and having only been appointed around the time of Party Conference, the Manager asked a young CCHQ employee if they knew of any female activists who may be willing to run against Williams, Richardson and Rock. As a result the Manager met with Clare Hilley twice, talked regularly to her on the phone and on a few occasions exchanged emails with her (see below). He claimed to her that Justine Greening MP (who has some responsibility for CF), Caroline Spelman MP (Chairman of the Party), the Shadow Cabinet and even David Cameron weren't keen on the current candidates but were keen on getting a woman in the role.
Hilley said she didn't think she had the time or money to organise a campaign, never mind having the time to be an effective Chairman. The Manager said that he could take care of the campaign and that unlike previous chairmen she could be more of a media spokesman than a director. He started to work on a website and other promotional materials, and even intended to use the CF Christmas Party to launch the campaign, even though candidates had (strangely) been told not to overtly campaign at it themselves. He also told her about the strength of different CF branches around the country and the details of meetings he had had with Mark Clarke and Justine Greening.
After all this, the Manager told the democratically-elected Chairman of CF, Mark Clarke, that he didn't know who Clare Hilley was.
Hilley initially thought about the idea before becoming concerned about the implications it would have for the relationship between CCHQ and the voluntary party, and realising that the Manager was clearly looking for somebody he could make decisions for. There is
no question about Hilley's integrity here at all and she deserves to be
re-elected Area Chairman of London South.
I spoke to the Manager this morning to give him a heads-up on my intention to go public with this and to see if he happened to have any solid rebuttals. The only one he offered, other than it all being "rubbish", was that he only met Clare Hilley as a matter of course because she was standing for Area Chairman. This was back in November - four months before the election - and at a point when she wasn't intending to stand for AC.
Now, read these email chains between the Manager and Hilley. The Party Board investigation was aware of these emails. A Party spokesman told me he was only encouraging her to stand and that anything more than that would of course be unacceptable, but these emails alone point to there being something more than encouragement:
- What was the "paper trail" he was so keen to avoid in November?
- What was the "leak" that he informed Hilley about in January?
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