16.02.2023

Chosen by Labour right

Tina Werkmann gives the inside story of how Jared O’Mara was selected, how he beat the odious Nick Clegg and how he quickly spiralled into a mental health crisis. Clearly he needs help, not a four-year prison sentence

Jared O’Mara was never supposed to win Sheffield Hallam in the snap general election of 2017. Last week, Wes ‘the weasel’ Streeting MP was quick to blame Jeremy Corbyn for O’Mara’s selection as Labour candidate, claiming: “The previous leadership of the Labour Party really lowered the bar”.

Streeting is not known to let a lack of knowledge on any matter slow him down. But even a cursory glance at the internal selection process used in 2017 would have reminded him that it was, in fact, Streeting’s mate, Iain McNicol, then Labour’s general secretary, who was responsible for the selection of O’Mara and all other candidates in areas without candidates in place. Instead of allowing Constituency Labour Parties to democratically elect their local candidates, McNicol enforced a process whereby a three-person panel of Labour’s national executive committee chose them instead.

One thing Jeremy Corbyn is guilty of is that he did not sack McNicol on day one of his leadership. He should have cleansed the party of its rightwing bureaucracy, including those officers and employees installed by McNicol at Labour HQ and the regional offices. But Corbyn never strayed from his path of trying to appease and neutralise the Labour right, even as they engaged in open warfare against him. This fatal mistake continues to cost the left in and outside the Labour Party dearly.

“In 2017, the CLPs were hugely inflated by Corbyn supporters,” explained Martin Mayer on Not the Andrew Marr Show¹ last week - he was a member of Labour’s NEC for Unite the Union at the time. “The left on the NEC argued to allow CLPs to elect their candidates from a short list, but we narrowly lost the vote. McNicol manipulated the three-person panels so that they always had two rightwing NEC members on them.”

Local Labour members did not have to read the Forde Report to know what was happening during that election campaign: the Labour right, led by deputy Labour leader Tom Watson and McNicol, did everything in their power to undermine and sabotage Jeremy Corbyn - which included the idea of possibly throwing the 2017 election. They withheld funding from local CLPs and secretly channelled money into seats with rightwing candidates.

Jared O’Mara was selected because he had previously applied to be a council candidate, which meant his papers were already ‘in order’ and he had been ‘vetted’ to one degree or another. On paper, he looked like a decent enough candidate, as he was young, without any political ‘baggage’ and a disability campaigner (he suffers from cerebral palsy, hemiparesis and, as it later emerged, autism and a number of mental health problems, including depression).

The fact that he was a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn only transpired after his selection. To be honest, despite the fact that he was the treasurer of my Labour Party branch, I had no idea of his politics. He was usually very, very quiet in meetings. McNicol and the NEC would also have had no idea of his political outlook. I remember how surprised we all were when Jared ‘outed’ himself as one of ‘us’.

But, once he did, much of the left across the six Sheffield CLPs got behind him and organised an incredibly enthusiastic campaign, fuelled by Corbyn mania. We ignored demands by Labour HQ to campaign for sitting rightwing MP Angela Smith in the neighbouring safe seat of Penistone and Stocksbridge and concentrated on Hallam. Although Hallam had never been held by a Labour MP, it was pretty obvious to us that it was winnable: the sitting MP, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, was deeply unpopular with the large student population, having dropped his party’s pledge to abolish tuition fees when the Lib Dems joined the Tory-led coalition government. And he had previously held the seat with a majority of only 2,500 votes. This clearly should have been a target seat.

Instead, Labour HQ entirely ignored it and did not allocate a single penny to the CLP. The £4,000 we ended up spending on leaflets and election rallies was raised entirely by local members. Over 200 people turned up for a final canvassing session on election day. The mood was incredible.

Crumble

But the cracks started to show pretty soon afterwards. Jared was clearly out of his depth and started to crumble. Instead of putting together a team with at least a few local leftwing campaigners, he was taken under the wing of the district and regional Labour Party (run by the right) and employed only staff who were suggested by them.

We hardly ever heard from him from that point. But then the local and national press started to take a closer look - and did not have to dig deep to find homophobic and sexist social media comments, followed by reports from young women who were aggressively chatted up by him when he was still working in a night club. Jared never seemed like an aggressive or homophobic person to me - but he clearly struggled to ‘fit in’ and probably tried to copy his slightly more successful friends.

As soon as he was suspended by the Labour Party three months after his election, he seems to have spiralled (further) into depression, starting to drink heavily and taking huge amounts of cocaine. Perhaps this was not entirely surprising, given the non-stop media interest in the downfall of a Corbyn follower - they lapped it up. Eight months later he was reinstated by the party, but resigned the day after. He sacked his entire staff and employed ‘mates’ from his days as a nightclub manager instead. He released a number of confused statements, blaming Jeremy Corbyn for not supporting and for “gaslighting” him. One of his ‘friends’ eventually turned on him and reported him to the police for fiddling expenses to the tune of £19,400 (Jared was also charged and found guilty for coming up with a £28,000 “proposed salary” to employ another friend of his).

His physical and mental disabilities clearly left him in a terrible state. Because of his hemiparesis, one side of his body is partially paralysed and he often told us that he could not sit for longer than 30 minutes without pain. Tosh McDonald from the Aslef train drivers’ union (which supported Jared after his victory) recounts:

The poor lad couldn’t do up his tie because of his cerebral palsy, he couldn’t open the door to his office in Westminster. But there was no support given to him. Other new MPs were given mentors, but he had nobody who helped him.²

Jeremy Corbyn revealed that Jared had sued him in this period:

I made sure the party gave him support, I gave him the leader’s office, but he took out various legal actions against me personally, which has given me three years of legal grief. It went a bit under the radar, but it’s now been resolved.³

Presumably this was under the Equalities Act and the failure to make reasonable adjustments. We do not know how much support he was given by the party or parliament - but it clearly was not enough.

A particular low point for all to see was when he gave an interview to the BBC while clearly drunk. In the wake of his trial, the interview has been gleefully rescreened far and wide by the mainstream media.

Clearly, Jared has serious mental health problems and was not pursuing any kind of outlandish “cocaine and alcohol-driven lifestyle”, as the judge in the case stated.⁴ A four-year prison sentence awarded to such an obviously vulnerable person is extremely harsh - especially compared to the slap on the wrist that Nadhim Zahawi got away with, despite having been caught out trying to avoid paying millions of pounds of taxes. The difference is that, unlike Zahawi, Jared had no highly paid advisors who could tell him how to successfully fiddle the rather elastic system of MPs’ expenses.

The prison system is not designed to ‘rehabilitate’ at the best of times. What it will do to somebody as vulnerable as Jared is, sadly, not hard to imagine. The man needs help - not to be locked up in the hell that is the British prison system.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy8EKPLsNK0 (February 12).↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
The Guardian February 9.↩︎