Poverty champion ran secret hate mail campaign
6 hours agoMarc WaddingtonNorth West Investigations
BBCKay Davies is still moved to tears by the memory of the letter she found when going through her late mother’s belongings.
“It was saying how sorry the writer felt for my mum. It was quite difficult to read that my mum had ‘spawned the ovum of a devil’ and that I was a disappointment. It was awful,” she said.
The Liverpool councillor suspected the person behind it was a colleague on the Labour benches, Gerard Woodhouse.
Over the next few years, other people would start to suspect they too were victims of a prolific poison pen campaign by the politician and charity boss.
Now, the 62-year-old is facing a potential jail sentence for bombarding a former lord mayor of the city with up to 100 anonymous hate letters – sometimes up to five a day.
Woodhouse was elected to represent Liverpool’s County ward in 2010. He quickly made a name for himself as a champion of the poor, through his work with the L6 Centre in Anfield.
His stories of impoverished families who had to draw Christmas trees on their walls because they could not afford the real thing earned him regular appearances in the local press, and on regional and national TV news.
But Ms Davies had seen another side to him.
In 2018, she and other people connected to the County ward became the focus of an abusive, anonymous Twitter account. When she raised a complaint with the social media platform, it investigated and linked the account to Woodhouse’s.
But it was the letter to her mother that hit her particular hard. It had been sent in 2018, after she and Woodhouse had fallen out. On finding it in 2022 after he parents had died, she saw how much upset it had caused her parents, who were in their 80s when they died.
Her father had scrawled the word ‘Liar’ on the envelope.
Ms Davies, 46, said she took the evidence of the Twitter abuse to the then-mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson.
She said: “I took it to Mayor Anderson over 20 times. I sent him 20 or 30 emails saying ‘please help me, look at this, can you look into this?’ and it even got to the point where I asked if the council would pay for this to be investigated properly.
“And Joe said no, public funds were not to be used for things like that.”
Mr Anderson did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
PA MediaBy now, Ms Davies was starting to feel that Woodhouse was being treated differently to others.
Also in 2018, Woodhouse was suspended by the Labour Party for using a grossly offensive term about her which was picked up on a recording.
He was allowed to keep his special mayoral allowance money – in contrast, she said, to how another Labour politician on the council had been treated when he was reported to have made derogatory comments about colleagues.
Ms Davies added that when Woodhouse returned from that suspension, she and other members had been whipped into supporting his appointment as a school governor.
“I said I couldn’t support that, knowing what I knew about his bullying behaviour. But I was basically told by a whip if I didn’t support it, I would be finished in the party,” she said.
Despite the concerns she had raised about Woodhouse, it was Ms Davies whose days with Labour were numbered.
Dismayed at the lack of action over his behaviour, she left to join the Liberal Democrats, before leaving the council in 2021.
Michelle Langan, 52, began receiving letters in the post to her home address in 2021, when she was still active in the Labour Party.
The typewritten letters made vile allegations about people to whom she was close, references to her family and personal attacks on her.
“This went on for about three years,” she said. “I was getting letters on a regular basis to my home address. And then when I opened my business, I started getting letters there as well.
“Every time one of these letters that had a typewritten font on the front came through my door, I just felt sick to the pit of my stomach.”
She had her suspicions that it was someone within the party sending them. Not least, she said, because she knew that some other people who had received them were people who were not active campaigners in the public eye.
Could someone with access to the party’s membership lists be abusing that information to wage a poison pen letter campaign against other members?
She said she believed the complaints had been passed up the Labour chain of command to regional party bosses, but she was never told if any action was taken.
In 2022, Labour decided not to re-select Woodhouse as a candidate.
The BBC has asked if this was to do with suspicions over his involvement in poison pen letter campaigns, but the party has not answered the question.
While Woodhouse’s time as a Labour councillor was coming to an end – which he blamed publicly on his past support for Jeremy Corbyn – his profile as an anti-poverty campaigner showed no signs of waning.
And it was something he did during a childhood hunger campaign in 2023 which provided a significant clue that he was anonymously targeting people through the post.
Kevin Robinson-Hale had been a Labour member before he left to join the Greens. During the pandemic, he had received a letter to his home address which contained two of his Green Party campaign leaflets, torn up, and an abusive letter written in red pen.
He was puzzled by the letter. He said when he asked around, he was told by other people that the handwriting was Woodhouse’s.
And in March 2023, he saw something that he believed proved it.
During Right To Food Week 2023, Woodhouse posted on Twitter what he described as “a powerful letter from one of our children”.
It was apparently one composed during an event at the community centre he was involved with, and was addressed to then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
It explained how the child shared her free school lunch with her friend because he had no food, and begged Sunak to “make free meals available to all”.
Mr Robinson-Hale said: “I thought, I don’t think I’ll be getting hate mail from a kid like that. It was exactly the same handwriting as the letter I’d got.
“I sent it to a couple of people who’d had the same and they confirmed it was Gerard’s writing, basically.”
The BBC took the two letters to forensic handwriting expert Lis Briggs, whose expertise is used by police forces.
As far as she was concerned, there was a strong case that the same person who had penned the letter from the little girl had written the abusive letter to Mr Robinson-Hale.
Ms Briggs said: “While I can never give a definite opinion because we’re talking about copy documents here, in my opinion there is strong evidence that the same person wrote the two letters and it’s unlikely that two people were responsible.”
While there had been suspicions about Woodhouse’s activities, the council had been made aware and police had been provided with evidence by Ms Langan, it was a breakthrough in summer this year that led detectives to his door.
Christine Banks, a former Liverpool lord mayor and long-standing Labour councillor, had been receiving abusive cards in the post for up to two years. Up to 100 in total, and sometimes up to five in a single day.
Some contained deeply upsetting references to her late daughter’s death.
While she had been trying to hide them from her family, she had been bagging them up and sending them to Merseyside Police. And on one they found forensic evidence that allowed them to arrest Woodhouse.
In October, he pleaded guilty to harassment without violence. He could face up to 16 weeks in prison when he is sentenced later.
In mitigation, he claimed he had been suffering from a “severe mental illness”, but offered no further explanation of why he had targeted his former Labour colleague.
Why Woodhouse targeted Banks remains a mystery. Ms Davies believes she was targeted by him because they fell out over how funding was being allocated in their ward, and Ms Langan does not know why she should have been in his sights.
The BBC has asked Woodhouse if he was behind the letters to Davies, Ms Langan and Mr Robinson-Hale, but he has not responded.
Ms Davies said she believed opportunities to properly tackle Woodhouse had been missed. It was, she said, an “open secret” that Woodhouse was behind the abusive campaigns.
The BBC has contacted ex-mayor Mr Anderson, party whips and the Labour Party to ask if they believed they had failed to hold Woodhouse to account, but has received no reply.
The BBC also asked the Labour Party whether concerns someone with access to party data was abusing it had been reported.
The party said it “took its obligations under General Data Protection Rules seriously”, adding if concerns had been raised, it would have reported them.
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