11 February 2023 , 19:14
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Jared O’Mara will find prison “incredibly difficult” - but his former chief of staff and co-defendant thinks the jailed ex-MP “genuinely believes he did nothing wrong”.
The former Sheffield Hallam MP is beginning a four-year prison term this week, following one of the most chaotic episodes in modern politics - which saw him submitting fake invoices for disability assistance services in order to feed his “galloping” cocaine habit.
Gareth Arnold infamously resigned as O’Mara’s chief of staff by hijacking his Twitter account to brand the Sheffield Hallam MP “the most disgustingly morally bankrupt person I have ever had the displeasure of working with."
After reporting his boss to the police, Arnold was jointly charged with the fraud offences that this week saw O’Mara jailed.
O'Mara was jailed for four years for six counts of fraud. He was cleared of one. (South Yorkshire Police / SWNS.CO)
Arnold was given a 15 month sentence, suspended for two years for three counts of fraud. He was cleared of a further three (South Yorkshire Police / SWNS.CO)Sentencing O’Mara, Judge Tom Bayliss KC said the ex-MP had abused his position and damaged trust in all MPs by committing “cynical, deliberate and dishonest” offences of fraud to feed a “cocaine and alcohol-driven lifestyle.”
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Arnold was found guilty on three out of six charges, over his involvement in submitting fake invoices to Parliament’s expenses watchdog, worth thousands of pounds.
He was handed a 15-month sentence, suspended for two years.
“He's a man with serious disabilities, Cerebral Palsy and Autism Spectrum Disorders,” Arnold said.
“I think prison will be an incredibly difficult experience for him and I sincerely hope he is provided with the support he so clearly needs."
Speaking exclusively to the Mirror, Arnold said the trial had cast a “dark uncertain void” over his future for three years.
“At the minute I’m still quite overwhelmed,” he said.
“You wanna earn some easy money??”
“You wanna earn some easy money?? Like get a lump sum by August,” O’Mara wrote to his friend Gareth Arnold in February 2019.
“I have a completely simple and very kosher way that involves bending the truth ever so slightly to both our benefits! I don’t know why more people don’t do it.”
By the end of August that year, The Mirror revealed both O’Mara and Arnold had been arrested - and held in custody overnight while police could raid their constituency office.
And last week, both were convicted and O’Mara sent to prison for their roles in the fraud.
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But even after the chaotic saga of drugs, money and occasionally politics played out over 12 days of evidence, with O’Mara denying his guilt, but refusing to give evidence in his own defence - Arnold isn’t sure his old boss will learn anything from his imprisonment.
“I’m not sure,” he told the Mirror. “I still think he genuinely believes he did nothing wrong.”
A rabbit in headlights
O’Mara and Arnold met for the first time in 2016, before Jared’s unlikely victory in the 2017 election - in which he ousted former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
They met in the smoking area of the Frog and Parrot - a Sheffield pub previously famed as brewer of Roger and Out, the strongest beer in the world, but which reinvented itself as a hub for Sheffield’s music scene.
O’Mara was a well known face on the scene, managing, booking bands and DJing at another venue, West Street Live - a few minutes’ walk away from the Frog.
Arnold, at the time, was best known for winding Britain First up on the internet.
West Street Live, which closed during the pandemic (Julian Hamilton/Daily Mirror)By 2017, when he was elected, West Street Live had become known as the ‘bar of last resort’ - the place you went when all other doors were closed to you. Its walls were plastered from floor to ceiling with A4 printouts of increasingly preposterous drinks offers.
Neither Jared nor Labour expected him to defeat Nick Clegg, despite having the backing of pro-Corbyn campaign group Momentum - and despite the still burning rage among students in the seat against the Lib Dem leader’s betrayal over tuition fees.
He looked like a “rabbit in headlights” as the result was read out, observers said - and partied with pals until 6am, before arriving bleary-eyed to thank local campaigners, many of whom didn’t know him well.
Within months of being elected, his political career slipped from scandal to disaster.
The Guido Fawkes website unearthed sexist and homophobic comments he’d made on a variety of music message boards years earlier, when he was in his 20s.
He’d resigned his role on the Women and Equalities Committee, after further comments from a Morrissey message board emerged, in which he referred to gay people as “fudge packers”.
Aged 37 by 2017, he apologised - claiming they were the brash words of young man, and he’d been on a journey since then.
But he was then accused of having called a constituent an "ugly bitch" just months before his election, during an argument at West Street Live - something O’Mara always denied.
He was suspended by Labour - and eventually reinstated - but he finally resigned from the party in July 2018, lashing out at the party for failing to provide him with support or make him “feel welcome”.
Meanwhile, his neighbours had begun to complain on Twitter that O’Mara was holding parties that raged until the early hours of the morning.
‘A prodigious cocaine habit’
The same month he withdrew from Parliament on advice on his GP. But despite pledging to carry on with casework for his constituents, his local office was increasingly dysfunctional.
He was rarely seen in the constituency office. Former case worker Kevin Gregory-Coyne said O'Mara appeared "once or twice" between November 2018 and April 2019 - and attended one staff meeting while apparently "on some sort of substance".
In March 2019, two of his aides resigned, he fired a further two members of staff, and a fifth resigned in solidarity. O’Mara’s office closed entirely for a month.
Meanwhile, O’Mara had developed a “prodigious” cocaine habit, consuming up to 5g of the class A drug a day, along with booze and 60 cigarettes.
Arnold claimed under questioning in court, O’Mara’s family would deliver bottles of vodka and Mountain Dew and packets of cigarettes to his flat on an almost daily basis.
And he would regularly be seen drinking and smoking around Sheffield’s late bars, often hitting up his old stomping ground of West Street Live and the legendary Dempsey's on a Thursday night.
In the early hours of a Friday morning in March , O’Mara sent an email to then-Prime Minister Theresa May and then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, complaining about provisions made for disabilities in Parliament.”
The email sent at nearly 4am and seen by the Mirror, read: “I would like a response within the next 7 days as to why neither of you believe The Equality Act and the Public Sector Equality Duty should be enforced within Parliament?
“I have asked everyone I can for help on this so far except you two, personally and directly. I just want future generations of MPs to benefit from it's protections irrespective of whether I do or not.”
By this point he’d already approached Arnold about making “easy money”.
When Arnold arrived in O’Mara’s office, he said, there was a backlog of legitimate invoices the MP had failed to submit.
Among those, he told Leeds Crown Court last month, were invoices for CAASY - the invented charity, which he says he believed were genuine.
He told the jury O’Mara had told him there were some legitimate CAASY invoices that he had misplaced, and that he recreated them with “placeholder” information and submitted them under O’Mara’s “direction”.
In reality, CAASY referred to John Woodliff, a former bouncer at West Street Live and a friend of O’Mara’s.
Mr Woodliff, who effectively became a “personal assistant” to O’Mara, said he would go to his flat and “pretty much get him up because he just lay in bed all day”.
The prosecution said his work involved tidying up the pizza boxes strewn around O’Mara’s flat and helping him get dressed.
Mr Woodliff was cleared of any involvement in the fraud.
Arnold said he thought he would “get the original invoices” at some point from the “back room full of papers”.
The court heard Arnold had joined O’Mara in taking cocaine, often in the bathroom of the MP’s Sheffield flat.
In April 2019, Arnold had messaged a friend to claim O’Mara was “a few K” in debt to a dealer, and that he worried he was at risk of “bad lads” coming round.
But in June, another message from Arnold to a friend boasted he’d just “smashed loads of coke” with a “local MP.”
The pair referred to the drug by the codename “goose”.
O'Mara became "isolated and paranoid", Arnold said (Sheffield Star / SWNS.com)“I’ll walk down,” Arnold told O’Mara in one text exchange. “Invite the goose as well. I’ll bring the OJ and make sure you’ve got ample fags”
Meanwhile, messages showed O’Mara and Arnold discussing ways to make money from the watchdog.
“There might be an awesome way to get you, the staff and me constructive dismissal and victimisation payments AND me stay as an MP and then rehire you an we all keep getting paid and they have to keep us on the books even if I lose an election,” O’Mara wrote on June 16th.
“Not sh**ing you! Looks like we’re all in fact employed by Ipsa and it’s nothing to do with my status as MP.”
Another, sent the following day read: “I’m earning you some money by the way. Lots of it. Just found something out!”
But concerns were already being raised over the crudely-made invoices by the watchdog.
“I’ve just reprinted [the invoices] and put the post code from Penistone Road McDonalds,” Arnold wrote on June 25th.
The following day O’Mara wrote back: ““Life or death stuff! Call me as soon as you get this!
“Remove the postcode entirely from the Autism invoices so it doesn’t have one before you submit it and then call me so I can tell you why and what’s just happened!”
“Nailed my response to Ipsa,” O’Mara wrote in June 2019, referring to queries from the watchdog over the invoices.
“Made it about disability and reasonable adjustments and told them I’m going to contact Mr Speaker and to please pay the autism money immediately or I’ll have to add that to my list.
“Also added in words like service, serve, parliamentary duties, obstructions and the like just in case anyone makes the connection.”
Arnold said he had finally "lost his patience" with O'Mara after he apparently drank a litre of vodka before a TV appearance and sent a young female staff member messages "calling her things like 'my little angel' and 'you're beautiful"'.
Events came to a head on July 23, 2019 - after Arnold dramatically resigned, hijacking O’Mara’s own Twitter account to brand him “the most disgustingly morally bankrupt person I have ever had the displeasure of working with."
He then went to South Yorkshire Police saying he’d reached "a point at which he was no longer willing to participate in the fraud".
In his call to police, played to jurors, Arnold said: "It's a bit of a tricky one but yesterday I spoke to the 999 service and the mental health crisis team about my employer, who I believe is suffering a severe psychotic episode and has delusions of a conspiracy against him.
"I also believe he has been submitting fake expense claims to the Government very recently."
The Mirror investigated rumours of O’Mara and Arnold’s arrest, confirming it first with local sources - and then with O’Mara’s family, who insisted he’d “done nothing wrong.”
But even after being arrested, he continued his attempts at fraud.
In February 2020 he emailed IPSA, falsely claiming the police investigation into him had been completed and he was entitled to be paid the two invoices relating to Arnold, which totalled £4,650.
“He became isolated and paranoid”
Arnold said he had not spoken to O’Mara since the arrest.
“I did not speak to Mr O’Mara during the trial at all,” he said.
Until he was sentenced, O’Mara had only appeared in court by videolink, mainly from the front-room sofa in his parents’ Sheffield home.
But for his final appearance, Judge Tom Bayliss KC told O’Mara that “indulgence” was over.
“He entered the courts via the back door," Arnold said. "I assume to avoid the considerable press group outside. He did not speak to anyone. I did not speak to him in the dock.”
Arnold said he was pleased the Judge and Jury had made a distinction between his involvement in sending the false invoices, and O’Mara’s continued attempts to get the watchdog to pay out, even after his arrest.
“The Judge was quite clear on this during the sentencing and ruled that Mr O'Mara had the highest level of culpability,” he said.
Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves today said O’Mara should “never have been selected” as a candidate - echoing criticisms of the party’s vetting process ahead of the 2017 election.
But Arnold still believes O’Mara “did originally have good intentions.”
And he claimed it was a lack of “support” while in the role that eventually led to his downfall.
He said: “I think he was thoroughly let down by the Labour Party, who found it easier to remove the whip and turn their back on him than offer him adequate mental health support during a time of crisis for an inexperienced politician.
“After this point his general behaviour and outlook chained considerably.
“He became isolated and paranoid. Had the proper support been offered to him in the first place I do not believe he would be in prison right now.”