Britain’s Conservative Sex Bus Scandal

David Cameron’s party is reeling from claims that a rising star used a campaign bus full of young activists as a ‘sexual buffet’ for MPs.

LONDON — Blackmail, extra-marital affairs, bullying, cover-ups, and sex on a pool table—three senior Conservative Party officials are gone and one young activist is dead after a series of lurid accusations were detonated inside party HQ.
It is alleged that the party’s boys (and girls) on the bus spiraled out of control during this year’s election under the direction of Mark Clarke, a former parliamentary candidate who oversaw teams of young activists sent to bellwether races.
A Conservative Party insider told The Daily Beast that Road Trip 2015 descended into a dystopian bacchanalia with Clarke bullying and manipulating his young charges, who were encouraged to have sex with Members of Parliament and senior party officials who agreed to join the campaign trips.
“It was known to the MPs that if you want a young boy or a young girl the Road Trip could provide that. You come for a campaigning weekend. You’ll be taken care of,” said Ben Harris-Quinney, chairman of the Bow Group, Britain’s oldest conservative think tank. “It involved the use of very naive young people and it became a sexual buffet.”
Gossip about these garrulous trips was encouraged by Clarke—who told the conservative Spectator magazine in June 2014 that his project was “a bit of a dating agency.”

Nudge-nudge, wink-wink morphed into a scandal that would reach the upper echelons of the Conservative Party when Elliott Johnson, a former Road Trip activist and political writer, committed suicide on Sept. 15. He was 21 years old.

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In a letter addressed to his parents and left on his bed, Johnson wrote: “I have been bullied by Mark Clarke.”
Two months earlier, Clarke was being feted by Prime Minister David Cameron for a Road Trip campaign that was hailed as decisive in the Conservatives’ shock election victory.

In numerous statements, party officials said they had received no warnings about Clarke’s behavior until August this year when several people, including Johnson, made complaints about bullying, sexual harassment, and attempted blackmail.

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In the aftermath of Johnson’s death, the party’s former chairman, Grant Shapps, resigned from the Cabinet; a former deputy chairman, Robert Halfon, admitted to cheating on his wife amid alleged attempts to blackmail him by Clarke; and the entire executive team that runs the party’s youth wing, Conservative Future, has been suspended.

Elliott Johnson’s father, Ray, has also called for the current party chairman, and close personal friend of Cameron, Lord Feldman, to resign for failing to act upon years’ of evidence that Clarke should not be placed into a position of responsibility over young people.
Clarke, 38, is now banned from the Conservatives for life, although he denies all of the allegations made against him. It is the end of the road for one of the party’s former “rising stars.” After being elected as chairman of Conservative Future, he was featured by Tatler magazine as a potential Cabinet minister in 2008. The spread in the high society bible earned him the nickname “the Tatler Tory.”

Road Trip 2015 descended into a dystopian bacchanalia with Clarke bullying and manipulating his young charges, who were encouraged to have sex with Members of Parliament.

Clarke was already developing something of an unwanted reputation, however. Harris-Quinney, who is also a Conservative councilor, clearly remembers the first time he met Clarke at the exclusive West End nightclub Mahiki, a favorite haunt of Prince Harry.

“He behaved in an extraordinary fashion. He was incredibly arrogant—I actually heard him say to a young girl, ‘I can get you a job in parliament.’ And 10 minutes later he was passionately kissing her in the corner of the club. He did the same thing with two other girls in the same night,” he told The Daily Beast.
Nonetheless, Clarke was selected as the Conservative Party’s prospective parliamentary candidate in Tooting, South London ahead of the 2010 election.