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?Health and careers were ruined, says Peter Hartley, above, speaking about the leadership of Dame Shirley Porter, top left, at Westminster City Council |
Dame Shirley’s former aide breaks silence –
17 years on‘
I carried the can. She didn’t care,’ says Peter Hartley, who was at the
centre of the Homes for Votes scandal
SHIRLEY Porter to write an autobiography?
“What a joke!” says her former aide.
Peter Hartley has for 20 years been thought of as one of the Porter’s willing henchmen – praised by the disgraced former leader of Westminster council as a “doer”.
But on reading that the Tesco heiress could be set to write an autobiography he has broken his silence revealing the events surrounding the build-up to one of the biggest scandals in local government history.
Mr Hartley was chairman of the committee that approved the sale of three Westminster cemeteries for 15p to a private bidder, who later stripped them of their assets and left them to ruin.
Later, as chairman of the housing committee, he rubber-stamped the illegal sell-off of thousands of council flats in the “homes for votes” scandal of the late 1980s.
Wracked with depression after the scam was exposed he was hounded by the press and forced underground.
We meet in a pub near Green Park on Wednesday night – 17 years after his last interview with the press.
The setting, deep in Porter’s former Westminster heartland, was fitting.
“Nobody but you knows the truth – you are the first person I have told about this,” he says.
“If she wants to sue, bring it on! I want the public to know the truth.”
Mr Hartley was part of a group of young Conservatives who swept the cobwebs out of City Hall.
Dame Shirley Porter, the Tesco heiress, had brought new drive to the council and Mr Hartley admits to being bowled over by her enthusiasm.
He says: “What we did not know was that we were voting in a megalomaniac, a political thug. She was politically naive and inexperienced. She wanted to run City Hall as a branch of Tescos and I told her that government had to be run differently.
“She modelled herself on Mrs T, But even Mrs T knew that if she went too far everybody in the Tory party would turn on her.”
He added: “If you crossed her you were out.”
Dame Shirley was in 1996 found guilty by the district auditor of illegally selling off almost 10,000 council homes to voters in an audacious bid to sustain Conservative Party dominance in Westminster.
But before that she had been exposed for masterminding the sale of three “loss-making” Westminster burial grounds for 15p. The cemeteries plan was rubber-stamped by Mr Hartley – but he claims it was Dame Shirley who took the final decision.
He says: “We were losing around £500,000 a year from the cemeteries.
“We found we could sell them for £400,000 and relieve ourselves of a loss-maker.
“But the city valuer told me just before completion that there were sitting tenants in a number of the houses, which we thought were vacant, on the site. I said this is really going to make me look stupid as the purchasers now want to pay nothing for it.
“Nobody knows this but I had to ask Shirley for authority and I told her don’t do it because to the outside world we are giving away a council asset for nothing. We would be treated as fools if we gave a council asset away for nothing. She said ‘I want them gone – sell it’.”
Mr Hartley was hounded by the press for months after the sale was exposed.
Branded a “vandal” he suffered a mental breakdown and was put on suicide watch in a central London hospital.
He says: “I resigned in 1988 over the cemeteries issue because of pressure of what went on when I became ill. I was reduced to a vegetable.
“It caused enormous tension with my family because they didn’t know what was going on. If I didn’t have a support group around me I would have killed myself.
He adds: “When I came out of it I became a Samaritan.”
Mr Hartley’s tribulations were far from over. Two years later the housing scandal blew up.
Dame Shirley planned the sale of 10,000 council homes in marginal wards across Westminster and, once again, Peter Hartley was chairman of the housing committee.
Andrew Hosken, the author of the unauthorised biography Nothing Like a Dame, believes Mr Hartley’s role in the cemeteries sell-off had given him a reputation as a “doer” and led to him being offered the housing chairmanship by Dame Shirley. But Mr Hartley said he was forced to take the job.
He says: “I told Shirley from the start because of my property interest that I never wanted to be housing chairman. I didn’t want to be accused of lining my own pockets.”
He pauses for a sip of his glass of white wine and you can almost feel the rage boiling inside him.
He says: “She looked over the table and said ‘let me spell it out to you Peter’ – that’s how she talked – ‘you are to take the housing committee or you’re out. As long as I’m leader you will never get a chairmanship again’. I said ‘you’ve got to be joking, I supported you!’
“I thought about it over night and I really wanted to go on and be a more successful politician. I was late-30s and [thought] do I want to be ostracised for good? I made the biggest mistake I have ever made by accepting.”
Mr Hartley said he opposed the Building Sustainable Communities scheme until Dame Shirley proved it was legal. He says: “Porter told the city solicitor to go out and get a strong opinion from counsel that will make this legal. ‘I don’t care how it’s done’.”
Mr Hartley was found innocent in the High Court in 1996 of illegally selling off the homes but Dame Shirley was branded a “liar” and ordered to pay a £27 million surcharge by the court.
His vice-chairman Councillor Michael Dutt committed suicide in the mid-1990s – a chilling indictment of what had taken place.
Mr Hartley says: “The health and careers of local government officers and local politicians were ruined.”
A businessmen, he remains a resident of Westminster.
He says: “Did I get one phone call from Porter from the day I resigned to the day I met her in court?
“Did I Hell. I carried the can.
“She didn’t care.”
“Money didn’t buy her happiness but it bought her freedom to run away and the rest of us were left to rot.
“One thing I know I did right. I went in to politics because I believed what the Conservative party stood for. Nobody is a model citizen.
“But every time I’ve been in public office I’ve done it for right reasons and done everything by the book.
“That is why all this has hurt me so much.”
Dame Shirley was unavailable for comment. Her former spokesman, Roger Rosewell, said she was not in the country.
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