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Voters dismissed as trash, a £1m Ibiza villa called the White House and the credibility crisis threatening ‘Labour’s Obama’ Chuka Umunna
By Guy Adams
PUBLISHED: 00:21 GMT, 13 April 2013 | UPDATED: 00:21 GMT, 13 April 2013
To users of the exclusive social network aSmallWorld, he was a glamorous London solicitor called ‘Harrison’ who spent his weekends trying to avoid ‘trash and wannabes’ in London’s West End.
One moment, he was mixing with what he called ‘a cool international crowd’ at Kensington’s ‘trash free’ Baglioni Hotel. The next, he was propping up the Swarovski crystal bar of the British Luxury Club, where it costs £350 to sit at one of the white leather ‘VIP tables’.
In the summer, the one-time nightclub DJ would adjourn to the Spanish party island of Ibiza, where he enjoyed ‘chilling on a beach or by the pool’ of a £1 million, six-bedroom villa called The White House. In winter, it was off to Miami, with its white sand beaches and vibrant dance music scene.
‘Is it just me, or is there a serious lack of cool places to go in central London at the weekends?’ asked ‘Harrison’ of his fellow party animals in one of his posts on the website between 2006 and 2008. ‘Most of the West End haunts seem to be full of trash and C-List wannabes.’
Chuka Umana, lawyer and Labour candidate for Streatham, London, appears to have two very different personalities
The values and louche lifestyle of this international man of mystery could not, at first glance, be much further removed from the beer-and-sandwiches tradition — and egalitarian ideals — of the Labour party.
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Yet when not rubbing shoulders with London’s ‘jetrosexual’ social elite, ‘Harrison’ was, in truth, Chuka Umunna, now the high-profile 34-year-old shadow Business Secretary in Ed Miliband’s frontbench team.
Type his real name into Google, and you’ll be whisked to a selection of glowing magazine profiles, and moody photo-shoots, from fashionable style titles such as GQ and Dazed & Confused.
There, journalists wax lyrical about the easy charms of the unmarried member for Streatham, who has been previously voted Britain’s ‘second sexiest’ MP (after Tory Zac Goldsmith) and, after just three years in Westminster, is widely tipped as a future Labour leader.
After earnestly outlining Blairite policy proposals, Chuka likes to joke about how he’s bald by choice (and shaves his head once a week), or let slip (to trendier titles) that he smoked marijuana as a dance music-loving teenager, although ‘it’s not something I’m proud of.’
‘He’s very slick, very Blairy, and politically a little hollow,’ says one writer who recently profiled him. ‘Some people mistake the slickness for arrogance. And while I quite liked him, I found his charm felt a little too practised.’
The Labour high-flier spends his summers at the six-bedroom £1million villa in Ibiza – a far cry from the constituency he represents
You get a further sense of that easy charm in clips of Umunna, with his ‘serious’ face, holding forth in polished tones (with a hint of Sarf London) during endless appearances on Newsnight, Radio 5 Live, Question Time, Sky News, or the Today programme on Radio 4.
There is, it’s fair to say, a world of difference between the squeaky-clean image this media-savvy young politician has cultivated in public, and the hedonistic secret persona he created on aSmallWorld, an invitation-only version of Facebook aimed at the super-rich.
Little wonder, then, that when his online alias became dramatically public earlier this month, Umunna was forced to issue an apology for ‘any offence’ caused by ‘Harrison’s’ online comments, particularly those which had described ordinary visitors to the West End as ‘trash’.
Had a Tory frontbencher been caught blithely making such a remark, it would surely have ended a career: Andrew Mitchell was forced to resign as Chief Whip last year after being wrongly accused of calling police officers ‘plebs’.
But political fortunes aren’t always a matter of logic. And in any case, a dispute over a very different online alias has since spawned a second, rapidly-deepening scandal which now threatens to stop ‘Chat Show’ Chuka’s meteoric rise in its tracks.
The hideaway, called the White House, has a tree-lined pool and is opposite a property rented by the likes of Leo DiCaprio
It revolves around Umunna’s glowing Wikipedia page which, at various points in the past five years, has called the mixed-race MP ‘Britain’s Barack Obama’, and declared him to be a ‘future Prime Minister’ in waiting.
Last week, it emerged that someone with the online identity ‘socialdemocrat’ had been responsible for almost all of those growing tributes, creating the page on the online encyclopedia in 2007, and then quietly making 12 edits to it in early 2008.
On Wikipedia, his subsequent move to the shadow Business role is described as a glorious ¿promotion¿
Intriguingly, every one of those changes was designed to make the would-be politician (who, at the time was seeking a safe Labour seat while working as an employment lawyer) look more attractive.
Umunna has often used the term ‘social democrat’ to describe himself, and once told the Black Socialist Society to change its name because ‘the Labour Party today is not socialist but social democratic.’
But when contacted by a Sunday newspaper, Umunna vehemently denied ever doctoring his Wikipedia page. ‘I don’t have any recollection of that log on, or any of the changes,’ he declared.
So far, so polished. But a few days later, it emerged that a second anonymous figure had also tweaked his Wikipedia entry.
On January 7, 2008, someone at the IP address 83.105.87.81 altered the page to include a quotation from a newspaper report stating that Chuka ‘may end up as the UK’s Barack Obama’.
Intriguingly, that IP address leads to the London office of a law firm called Rochman Landau — where Umunna worked at the time. So, if the site was doctored at Chuka’s own office, are we still to believe that he never altered that Wikipedia profile?
Apparently so: Umunna’s aides again issued a carefully-worded statement on Thursday, once more saying that ‘Chuka has no record or recollection’ of having ever altered his Wikipedia profile. Instead, they insisted, it must have been edited by ‘someone else’ at Rochman Landau.
We must, of course, take those aides at their word. For it is surely unthinkable that Umunna, who has always publicly claimed that he dislikes being compared with Obama, would seek to secretly draw attention to such a comparison.
However, cynics have pointed out that claiming to have ‘no recollection’ of something isn’t the same as unequivocally denying you did it.
‘I think Chuka now needs to front up and give a frank account of exactly what’s been happening with his online activity,’ Tory MP Nigel Adams tells me. ‘This affair calls his judgment into serious question.’
Political opponents are busy pointing out that not every public statement Umunna has uttered in his short Westminster career has been entirely as it seemed at the outset.
Man of the people? Seen in Tulse Hill, Umunna says he was raised on the mean streets of south London, but he was brought up in considerable prosperity
Take, for example, his response in September to a newspaper interviewer who asked where he’d sourced his perfectly-fitting suit.
Attempting, no doubt, to sound like a man of a people, the famously snappy dresser said it had been knocked together by ‘the sister of a Labour organiser’ from his Streatham constituency, for less than £500.
When pushed by his interviewer he admitted it was in fact made to measure by Alexandra Wood, a Savile Row tailor whose off-the-peg suits range in price from £595-£1,000 and whose bespoke garments can go for several times more.
And that wasn’t the first time followers of Umunna’s fortunes have wondered if appearances can deceive. His life story, so intriguing to glossy magazines, raises its share of unanswered questions.
Umunna has often spoken of his childhood on the mean streets of South London, where he claims to have only narrowly escaped being caught up in the Brixton riots of the early Eighties, while a child. That may be so, but he was raised in considerable prosperity.
His father, Bennett, was a Nigerian immigrant who set up a successful import-export business. His mother, Patricia, was the daughter of a High Court judge.
Despite an inexorable rise in his career, the MP has not had a fellow politician come forward with public support for him this week
The family, which also includes sister Chinwe, lived in a large detached house on a leafy road just off Tooting Common, now valued at roughly £1.2 million.
By the late Eighties, Bennett had made enough cash to invest £50,000 in Crystal Palace football club, where he was registered as a director under his birth name, Chief Bennett Obiese Umunna, alongside such sporting grandees as commentator David Coleman.
Bennett is also believed to have invested heavily in property in Ibiza, and was reported yesterday to have sold 20 holiday flats in its largest town, San Antonio, for around £500,000 at the height of the Eighties boom. He also oversaw the building of the luxury Casa Blanca (the White House, in Spanish), overlooking San Antonio Bay, which remains in the family and is used by his son.
He died in 1992, when Chuka was 13, in a road accident in Nigeria, where he was standing for election as a State governor. The crash has never been properly explained. Fellow Crystal Palace director Ron Noades told a newspaper last year he believed Bennett was assassinated, possibly by political enemies over his anti-corruption stance.
Bennett’s will, which went to probate in September that year, reveals that — for tax purposes — he left an estate valued at a mere £307,283.
Exactly how that figure was so low is unclear. But last year, it emerged that the family’s home, in which his widow Patricia still lives, was financed via a Jersey-based trust called Vona which helps ‘high net worth’ individuals to ‘plan for and mitigate tax liabilities’.
After just three years in Westminster, is widely tipped as a future Labour leader
A spokesman for Chuka, who has publicly criticised ‘tax avoiders’ in the City, told me this week: ‘We categorically deny the arrangements . . . were put in place to limit tax liability for the family.’
At the time of his father’s death, he was being privately educated at St Dunstan’s College in Catford, one of London’s oldest and most prestigious day schools. Fees are currently almost £5,000 a term.
He has long claimed to have been a wayward teenager, who smoked pot and was heavily into drum and bass music. But he was also a model student — deputy head boy and a firm favourite of the school’s then deputy head Anthony Seldon, the acclaimed biographer of three Prime Ministers.
‘He was a hugely diligent student, fantastic to teach because he was genuinely interested and open-minded,’ Seldon tells me. ‘His politics were still being formed, but he was clearly left of centre.
New Labour’s rising star swiftly found himself nicknamed ‘two-faced Chuka’ by opponents, on account of his alleged obsession with spin
‘At the time, Tony Blair had just come to the Labour leadership. The party was being transformed into New Labour, and anything seemed possible. That influenced him a great deal.’
After studying law at Manchester, where he joined the Labour party, and taking an MA at Nottingham Law School, he moved into a job at City law firm Herbert Smith, before joining Rochman Landau in 2006.
At the time, he was earning enough to buy his home, a £230,000 yuppie flat, now worth almost double that, in a converted art deco cinema on Streatham High Road.
A long-standing trustee of Compass, the Left-wing pressure group and think tank, he was sufficiently prosperous to move into politics.
So began an inexorable rise, fuelled by the media’s seemingly endless interest in both his shining political prospects and colourful private life, which has seen him squire some of Westminster’s most eligible females, including fellow Labour MP Lucinda Berger.
But long before revelations about his online aliases hit the news agenda, there were whispers that Umunna was riding for a fall. Indeed, New Labour’s rising star swiftly found himself nicknamed ‘two-faced Chuka’ by opponents, on account of his alleged obsession with spin.
One Saturday in October, for example, he was ridiculed for attending a trade union march in Central London dressed in fashionable casual clothes — 20 minutes after he’d gone on TV a smart suit.
‘The guy’s so two-faced he took two outfits to the same event, and changed into casuals to fit in with the workers,’ says one Tory critic.
In March, he was teased for telling Irish hosts at a St Patrick’s Day party to ‘call me Chuka O’Munna’. The joke was pinched from Barack Obama — the man he supposedly doesn’t want to be compared with.
And several months earlier, after months of making populist public criticisms of the banking industry, he accepted the sponsorship of RealTime, a financial services company, for his summer cocktail party. This was estimated to be worth £6,000.
‘On their own, all these things are small beer,’ says one Tory MP. ‘But, taken together they indicate a pattern of poor judgment.’
Another worrying sign for Umunna has been the failure of a single Labour MP to come forward with public support for him this week. That speaks to a lack of genuine popularity at Westminster which has its roots in his appointment as Ed Miliband’s Parliamentary Private Secretary shortly after being elected in 2010.
‘Chuka was never going to get on with the old Labour boys, because that’s not his background. But he’s managed to become strangely disliked in New Labour circles, too,’ says one party strategist. ‘I’m afraid the reason is personal. He tried to boss the wrong people around, even some former Cabinet ministers.’
On Wikipedia, his subsequent move to the shadow Business role is described as a glorious ‘promotion’. One thing is certain: you can’t accuse him of lacking chutzpah
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2308381/Voters-dismissed-trash-1m-Ibiza-villa-called-White-House-credibility-crisis-threatening-Labours-Obama-Chuka-Umunna.html#ixzz2QKCOyY3s
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