Six years ago, Jared O’Mara was seen as a breath of fresh air for British politics. “You don’t see people like me – young, working-class lads with disabilities – in parliament, but now you’re going to,” he said with understandable pride.
Today, O’Mara’s reputation is in tatters, his fall as spectacular as his rise. The former MP for Sheffield Hallam has been found guilty of trying to claim about £24,000 of taxpayers’ money to help fund a prodigious drug habit.
During his two-week trial at Leeds crown court, O’Mara emerged as someone who not only took vast amounts of cocaine but drank a litre bottle of vodka and smoked 60 cigarettes on a daily basis. He harboured conspiracy theories about a shadowy government cabal that was out to get him. He thought the Commons speaker at the time, John Bercow, had it in for him. He spent hours firing off hundreds of messages but did little to no work for his constituents.
It was, prosecutors said, “a very straightforward case of fraud”. But it was the background to the fraud that made the case particularly compelling.
O’Mara regularly took five grams of cocaine a day, jurors heard. A gram cost £50, one witness said. O’Mara turned up to a staff meeting gurning, grinding his teeth and talking a million miles an hour.
He owed money to a dealer. On hearing this, a friend of O’Mara’s chief of staff, Gareth Arnold, sent a message that read: “That’s a very dangerous game, that. He wants to be careful that no bad lads come for him, he’s on 80k a year, ffs.” Arnold said in evidence that it was “a very open secret” in Sheffield that O’Mara took cocaine.
O’Mara was a heavy drinker. The court heard that every other day, if not every day, his parents would bring him a litre bottle of vodka, bottles of Mountain Dew and 60 cigarettes.
O’Mara was said to be “shit-faced” when he was interviewed by BBC Look North. Arnold accused him of drinking a whole bottle of vodka before it. The MP denied being drunk but footage of the interview, tracked down by the Guido Fawkes website, does not help his cause. O’Mara is clearly slurring as he speaks of his intention to stand in the 2019 election. Arnold recalled O’Mara’s parents telling him that O’Mara was not just drunk, he was “hammered”.
O’Mara almost never went to the constituency office in Sheffield and very rarely went to parliament, the court heard. His friend John Woodliff, a former bouncer and milkman who said he acted as a kind of personal assistant, would go to O’Mara’s house and “pretty much get him up because he just lay in bed all day”.
Woodliff told police he was in effect a dogsbody who would drive O’Mara to the shops and tidy up his used pizza boxes. Sometimes he had to get O’Mara ready, putting his shoes and socks on, because the MP had ripped tendons in his arm and was incapacitated on one side.
“To be honest, he was slowly but surely getting worse. There were days when I went down, he was drunk and it used to be 10 in the morning,” he said.
O’Mara did not appear in person at his trial, instead tuning in via video link from his home in Sheffield flanked by his solicitor. He was given the opportunity to give evidence using the video link, but declined.
It all should have been so different. O’Mara was elected in June 2017, defeating the former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg in a seat, with its sizeable student community, that Labour had never held. It was a huge shock and O’Mara, who has cerebral palsy, was cast as a disability rights campaigner, which was true.
But O’Mara was more than that. He was an ordinary bloke – “a real person, as opposed to a robot pretending to be one,” said one profile. Before parliament, he was the manager and regular DJ at the Sheffield nightclub West Street Live. As well as having an encyclopaedic knowledge of music, O’Mara is a Marvel comics geek and a massive fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all things Joss Whedon. He supports Sheffield Wednesday, as he revealed in his maiden speech to parliament.
That maiden speech did not take place until July 2018 because O’Mara had been suspended by the Labour party in October 2017 after a series of homophobic and sexist remarks he had made on social media emerged.
In the summer of 2018, after a formal warning, O’Mara was allowed back into Labour, but he resigned the whip, claiming he had been treated like a criminal. He had made mistakes, he said, and used “distasteful language as a clumsy attempt at satire and sarcasm”.
By 2018, O’Mara had been diagnosed with autism, making him, he said, the UK’s first autistic MP. In his maiden speech, O’Mara, although not a Christian, referenced Jesus. “He was a man who forgave those who truly repented and he shares my belief that our utmost human priority should be helping those who are at the most disadvantaged and vulnerable.”
The speech came on what was to be a very rare visit to parliament. He said his autism meant he was unable to cope with the shouting, heckling, loud noises and aggression of parliament. Most of his days were spent at his flat.
In truth, no one had expected O’Mara to win the seat, least of all O’Mara. Nobody is now taking any credit for his victory, although there have been claims. “Momentum boots out Nick Clegg,” ran a headline on the Labour Briefing website. O’Mara himself said he was grateful for Momentum’s help but his win was “a victory for every shade of red in the party”.
All those shades of red will surely be asking how O’Mara became a candidate in the first place. And will tougher vetting procedures prevent someone like O’Mara becoming a candidate again?
