The 'sex pest' Lib Dem MP and the vulnerable mother whose cry for help Clegg ignored

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Publication date: 2 April 2013

Mike Hancock MP has been the subject of many complaints from women

Constituent alleges ‘improper sexual advances’ when she sought his help

She says that he is 'a liability to women'

By BARBARA DAVIES

PUBLISHED: 23:51 GMT, 1 April 2013 | UPDATED: 10:03 GMT, 2 April 2013

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'Improper': Lib Dem MP Mike Hancock has fended off many complaints about his womanising behaviour

The wording of the letter that landed on Nick Clegg’s desk almost exactly two years ago makes clear the desperation of its sender.

Complaining about the ‘improper’ behaviour of one of his MPs — renowned womaniser Mike Hancock — it was sent by recorded delivery on March 9, 2011, to the Liberal Democrat headquarters in Cowley Street, Westminster.

‘What he did to me is shocking,’ wrote 37-year-old Annie from Portsmouth in Hampshire — whose real name can’t be revealed for legal reasons.

She had emailed the Deputy Prime Minister three weeks earlier, detailing her complaints about Hancock, whose sexual exploits have been the basis of newspaper stories for the past three decades.

When she emailed Clegg, Annie received an automated response telling her that due to the high volume of correspondence received by his office, it might be better to post a letter, which is what she did, detailing what she alleges were 66-year-old Hancock’s ‘improper sexual advances’ after she sought his help in dealing with her noisy neighbours.

In the letter, seen by the Mail this week, she added: ‘I am also deeply upset that as the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats you have done nothing to oust this man from politics.

He cannot be trusted and he is a liability to women, the public and also your party. His conduct should be a matter for you as leader of the party.’

She ends: ‘Please reply to this letter as it is very important to me that I get an answer from you.’

But Annie, a vulnerable 39-year-old single mother who lives with her teenage son in a two-bedroom council maisonette, did not get a reply — a fact that has come back to haunt the Deputy PM in recent days.

His party is already under fire after claims that it turned a blind eye to allegations of sexual misconduct by former chief executive Lord Rennard.

The revelation that it also ignored warnings about a second senior Liberal Democrat — and did not investigate or respond to Annie’s claims — has only fuelled the controversy.

Courting controversy: MP Mike Hancock has been involved with Katia Zatuliveter, left, and Elizabeth McCann, right

Last week, under intense pressure, Clegg dispatched chief whip Alistair Carmichael to interview Hancock and investigate Annie’s claims that she was sexually harassed. He is expected to report back within a fortnight.

Portsmouth City Council has also appointed an external lawyer to examine whether Hancock abused his position and broke the council’s code of conduct in his dealings with Annie.

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In fact, worrying allegations about Hancock’s behaviour — included in letters to former Lib Dem leaders Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy — have been made since 1990 but without any action being taken.

Married father of two Hancock was arrested in October 2010, but not charged, over Annie’s allegations that he placed his hand on her breast, exposed himself and kissed her without consent.

While prosecutors decided there was not enough evidence to press charges, Annie is now suing the flamboyant MP for Portsmouth South, who has been married to his wife Jacqui for 45 years, for sexual assault, harassment and misfeasance in public office.

‘What hurts her most of all is that no one has listened to her,’ a friend told the Mail this week. ‘All along she has felt as if it is her word, as an ordinary woman, against that of a powerful man and that she doesn’t stand a chance.’

Indeed, among the dossier of evidence in Annie’s solicitor’s hands is one email, sent to her at 1.16am in March 2011 from Hancock’s Portsmouth office, in which his constituency secretary Mandy Collis writes: ‘He may be a flirt and touchy feely but the accusations you made are just not fair.’

After adding: ‘I do understand your illness (possibly a reference to Annie’s mental health)’, she adds: ‘I just feel sorry for you’ before signing off: ‘Please be careful’.

Warning: Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was sent complaints about Mike Hancock but did not respond

Annie first met Hancock in October 2009 at his constituency office in Southsea. With her son and then boyfriend beside her, she spoke to him about problems with inconsiderate neighbours and respite care for her son. She also told him about her mental health problems, a result of emotional trauma she suffered after being sexually abused as a child.

According to her friend, Hancock, who is also a Liberal Democrat Portsmouth city councillor, winked at her throughout the meeting, to the point where she wondered if there was something wrong with his eye.

She visited his office twice over the following months before Hancock wrote to say that the best way to help with her housing problems would be if he was to visit her at home.

‘I am going to try to find a situation where we can meet and I think I will come and visit you,’ he wrote in a letter dated December 2, 2009.

He turned up, out of the blue, three months later, ostensibly to look at Annie’s garden, which was part of the dispute with her neighbours.

Over the following months, Hancock began to visit Annie regularly and in March even gave her and her son a tour of the Houses of Parliament and invited them to dine with him in one of the restaurants there.

‘She wasn’t keen to go, but her son was very excited about it and it was a pretty amazing opportunity,’ says the friend who spoke to the Mail.

During dinner, Annie met Katia Zatuliveter, Hancock’s former research assistant, a young blonde Russian with whom, it later transpired, he was having an affair, sparking fears that she was a spy.

‘She came down to the dining room briefly during the meal,’ says the friend. ‘Annie felt she was being checked out by her. She said afterwards to Hancock that Katia was a bit of a ‘plain Jane’ and he said:

“You should see her dolled up. She’s amazing”.’

At the end of the evening, Hancock drove Annie and her son back to Portsmouth in his black Chrysler Jeep.

A few weeks later, Hancock, who was appointed CBE in 1992, largely for his work with the mental health charity Mencap, bought her gifts including a bottle of perfume — Paco Rabanne ‘XS’ — and a teddy bear wearing a red House of Commons jumper which he had sprayed with his aftershave and named ‘Mike’.

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Other presents included a box of mint chocolates and a bottle of wine, both with House of Commons labels.

More disturbing were the texts he began sending Annie, of which she has kept 35 on her mobile phone.

One of them reads: ‘Please give me a chance you never know my Princess xxx’. In another he wrote: ‘you are special and sexy to me’ and another: ‘One day I will prove you wrong my love’ and ‘would you be happy with a guy like me?’

But according to her friend: ‘She felt increasingly uncomfortable that the relationship with Hancock had become so familiar and somehow personal. She just wanted him to solve the dispute with her neighbours so she wouldn’t have to see him again — and now suddenly she didn’t know how to deal with him.

Bad conduct: The Portsmouth South MP, 66, has now been interviewed by the Lib Dem chief whip

This was someone she thought she could trust, a figure of authority but she was being forced to try to keep him at arm’s length.’

Annie’s dealing with Hancock ended abruptly at the beginning of July when, in a text, she accused him of being ‘selfish’ and ‘only out to get what you want from people’.

He never called her again and after that she received only official correspondence via his office.

By then she had confided in the family support worker assigned to her by Social Services and, later that summer, she gave the woman permission to report Hancock to the police.

Hancock, who has always denied any misconduct, was arrested in October 2010 but two months later, the Crown Prosecution Service told Annie there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed with a criminal case.

She then wrote to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, John Lyon, but was told that the Committee ‘cannot consider the way a Member deals with a particular constituent’s case, and nor does the code extend to a Member’s private and personal life’. Annie, however, categorically rejects that she met Hancock in a private or personal capacity.

‘She didn’t meet him at a party,’ says the friend. ‘She went to him as her MP but he immediately began to go after her. What else do you call giving a present of a teddy bear sprayed with his aftershave?’

In desperation Annie decided to write to Nick Clegg in February last year, sending copies to Labour Leader Ed Miliband, Home Secretary Theresa May and even the Queen.

The last two were the only ones to reply. The Home Secretary said that if the CPS had decided not to prosecute, Annie ‘may wish to write to the Liberal Democrats’. The Queen’s office advised Annie that, if she felt her case had not been investigated properly, she should go to the Police Complaints Commission.

Finally, last September, Annie complained to Lib Dem-led Portsmouth City Council, of which Hancock has been a member since 1971.

Last week, council members heaped further pressure on Hancock by appointing an external lawyer to examine allegations that he abused his position and broke the council’s ‘code of conduct’ in his dealings with Annie.

For years, the Lib Dems seemed unperturbed by concerns about Hancock’s extra-marital antics.

The son of a Navy stoker who grew up on a council estate, he has always insisted that his private affairs are separate from his political career. But his dealings with Annie are not the first time these two worlds have become blurred.

As far back as the 1990s, a letter was sent to then Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown expressing alarm about Hancock’s personal life.

‘There were huge concerns about his behaviour and his affairs,’ says former Lib Dem councillor John Thompson, who wrote that letter. ‘But no response was received.’

Thompson later wrote to Ashdown’s successor, Charles Kennedy, who replied that Hancock’s behaviour was ‘a private matter’.

One of the triggers for Thompson’s first letter of complaint was Hancock’s alleged relationship with a Romanian girl, Daniela Aura Dobre, during an aid trip to an orphanage near Bucharest in October 1990 when Hancock was an officer at Mencap.

Working for Mike Hancock: Former parliamentary aide Katia Zatuliveter was cleared of liaising with Russian spies while working Hancock, a member of the Defence Select Committee, with whom she had an affair

A newspaper report from the time claimed that he returned to visit the 20-year-old several times and quotes an aid worker, Shirley Pearce: ‘We all knew he was having a relationship with her. She was young but that didn’t stop him.’

Tracked down by a British newspaper some years ago, Daniela claimed: ‘We were very close. I miss him very much. He’s a kind and charming man.’

During the mid-Nineties, Hancock’s affairs with two political colleagues — his constituency secretary Daphne Sparshatt and fellow Lib Dem councillor Elizabeth McCann, a married mother of three, also made headlines and earned him the nickname ‘Handyc**k’ among council colleagues.

At the time, Mrs McCann said: ‘He tells you exactly what you want to hear .?.?. but after a while you realise so much of it is all lies.’

Daphne Sparshatt, who claimed she had a six-year affair with Hancock, now declines to speak about their relationship but in a 1994 interview said: ‘I was let down and emotionally devastated. He’s no great looker, he’s not God’s gift to women, but he charms his way in.’

In 2011 Hancock was forced to admit to kissing and cuddling a 17-year-old who had come to his office with her mother to ask about work experience. His admission came during a court case brought about after a county council opposition candidate accused him of being a ‘paedophile’ in an election leaflet.

But it was his relationship with Katia Zatuliveter that provoked most controversy.

In a diary she kept during their affair, Zatuliveter, 22, who was cleared of being a spy and now works in Moscow, referred to Hancock as ‘my darling Teddy Bear’.

Yet these shenanigans, it seems, were not enough to give the Lib Dem leadership cause for concern about Hancock until last week.

Anne’s complaint is also the subject of civil proceedings that will be heard at the High Court in due course. Just how damaging her story is to the Lib Dems, and to Hancock, remains to be seen.

Conservatives and members of UKIP are said to be gearing up for a potential by-election in the belief that Hancock may have to resign.

At the very least, Annie’s experience raises questions about the personal conduct of MPs towards their constituents and highlights the need for clarity when it comes to deciding what is appropriate behaviour and what is not.

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Persons: Michael Hancock, MP