Clegg response to Hancock raises more questions
Nick Clegg, in his weekly radio phone-in on LBC this morning, spoke publicly about the Mike Hancock case for the first time. But there were puzzling discrepancies and omissions from his account of events which suggest his party is handling this matter just as badly as it handled the allegations about Lord Rennard, and has learnt very little from that scandal.
First Mr Clegg claimed on the radio today that his office hadn’t received one of the letters of complaint, detailing allegations from a woman in Portsmouth who alleged Mr Hancock abused his position as a local MP and councillor to make serious sexual advances towards her.
Here’s what Nick Clegg said:
“I never received, my office never received one of the letters from the complainants’ solicitors. We did receive a letter in February this year. You’ll be aware, I hope, because I think it’s only fair to point this out the police have looked into this matter before, have dismissed it because they don’t think they can take it forward on advice from the Crown Prosecution Service.
“But you’re right, we did receive a fuller letter from the complainant in February of this year and I have asked the chief whip over the last several weeks to….”
The radio presenter Nick Ferrari then interrupted to ask Mr Clegg if he replied to that letter in February. He replied:
“Well we’ve done more than that. We’ve actually..er my chief whip has gone down to Portsmouth, has spoken to Mike Hancock’s solicitors, has written to the complainants’ solicitors offering to meet them, I hope they will do that.
“So, I hope you won’t imply in any way that we’re not acting very very thoroughly and quickly in response to what of course are serious allegations which are also very vigorously denied by Mike Hancock.”
Complaint direct to Clegg
I understand that the missing letter Clegg was referring to was not, in fact, from “the complainant’s solicitors”, as he said this morning, but was sent by the complainant herself. It was written to Nick Clegg on 9 March 2011 and addressed to him at the Liberal Democrat headquarters.
This letter followed an email the woman sent to Nick Clegg’s office on 24 February 2011, also outlining her complaint. She got a standard acknowledgement of receipt -apparently in response to her complaint – but never got a detailed response. Having had no success with either her email or letter in the winter of 2011, the woman says she wrote a second letter to Clegg in May 2011. Again, no reply.
She then phoned the cabinet office to chase up a response and her call was passed on to the directorate of communications office in No.10. The woman took the precaution of recording the conversation, and the remarks by the Downing Street official she spoke to DO suggest Clegg’s office had, in fact, received her letter, contrary to what the Lib Dem leader said today.
No response
The woman was told her complaint would be handled by the “political section” and that they would get back to her. They never did.
What Nick Clegg didn’t mention at all on the radio this morning was that after the woman had met with no success she employed the leading solicitor Harriet Wistrich to make her case.
Ms Wistrich wrote to Liberal Democrat HQ on 24 October 2011 repeating her client’s complaint. And a letter from David Allworthy of the Liberal Democrats, dated 7 February 2012, says the complaint was considered by the “relevant committee”, and “the committee decided that it would not commence any investigation or take any other action in respect of the matter that you have raised”.
Mr Allworthy added that the committee had taken into account the fact that both the police and the parliamentary commissioner for standards had decided not to pursue the complaint. “That has to be an end to the matter,” Mr Allworthy concluded.
Mr Clegg made no reference at all today to that exchange of letters, or the decision of his party’s “relevant committee” in early 2012 or late 2011 to dismiss the complaint.
The Carmichael letter
Mr Clegg’s confirmation (of what I reported on Tuesday) that his chief whip (Alistair Carmichael) is now involved is also less than a full explanation of what has happened. First, Mr Carmichael didn’t just visit Mr Hancock’s solicitors in Portsmouth – as Clegg said – but Mr Hancock himself (pictured right), as I broadcast and blogged on Tuesday.
Second, it was only this afternoon that the complainant’s solicitor, Harriet Wistrich, received the Carmichael letter which Clegg mentioned today. It was only written on Tuesday 26 March – just two days ago.
It was more than a month ago, on 22 February, in the midst of the furore over Lord Rennard, that Ms Wistrich wrote again to Nick Clegg to raise her client’s complaint. Alistair Carmichael sent a quick response on 26 February saying “I am giving it urgent consideration and shall revert to you more fully in early course”.
‘Urgent consideration’?
Yet it took Mr Carmichael four weeks before he wrote back to offer a meeting. This hardly suggests “urgent consideration”. And the timing is highly suspicious. One must wonder whether Mr Carmichael was only prompted to write to Ms Wistrich because of the decision by Portsmouth council on Tuesday to start their own full-scale investigation into the matter, combined with the accompanying flurry of interest that day from myself and other journalists.
But Nick Clegg’s spokeswoman vehemently denied Mr Carmichael’s invitation to Ms Wistrich and her client was in response to developments on Tuesday.
When Nick Clegg was asked on the radio today if he’d spoken to Mike Hancock about the allegations of sexual misconduct, he told LBC listeners that he hadn’t.
“I’ve not spoken to Mike Hancock about this, not least because he’s been very, very ill and he’s hardly been in Westminster for a very long time.”
And Mr Clegg got very heated about the matter. Here, too, his response is less than convincing.
Hancock: heart surgery
It is true that Mr Hancock has been pretty ill recently, and has had serious heart surgery, and it’s also the case that he has not been seen at Westminster much in recent months. But the MP has hardly been totally out of action.
Commons voting records show Hancock voted in the big votes on gay marriage at the start of February. A few days before that, in late January, he managed to attend a council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg (a third political post which he holds). Again the records show he took part in several votes in Strasbourg.
What’s more he’s also been fulfilling his duties as a Portsmouth councillor and the council’s cabinet member for economic regeneration. The Council told me today that since the start of January Mr Hancock has attended five of the ten formal meetings he would have been expected to go to. So it wouldn’t have been THAT difficult for Clegg to question him.
After the Rennard story, broken by Channel 4 News, one would have expected a much greater urgency about the Lib Dems’ response to the allegations against Hancock, which the MP strenuously denies. These allegations are arguably a lot more serious than those against Lord Rennard.
One wonders how much, if anything, the Liberal Democrats have learnt from their embarrassment over the Rennard scandal.
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