David Jack, the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Stoke-on-Trent North, resigned yesterday after accusations that he sent a racist email to a constituent (but see update below).
David cited professional and personal issues as the reason for his decision to step down, but last night’s Channel 4 News gave details of an email allegedly sent by Mr Jack, which contained racist and abusive language. He has denied sending the email, claiming he was out drinking with friends at the time the email was sent.
The former candidate is involved in a legal dispute with a number of companies as a result of exposing an alleged financial scam on the local Liberal Democrats web site, and claims that he is the victim of a smear campaign related to his campaigning.
Christine Grocock, who was Chair of the Stoke-on-Trent local party until the end of 2009, said:
“I am very surprised at these allegations and disappointed that David has had to resign. We are now waiting for the party to report on what will happen next”.
Parliamentary candidate for Stoke-on-Trent South and Deputy Leader of the Lib Dem council group Zulfiqar Ali, was also surprised at the nature of the allegations. He said:
“David was always very friendly and we had a good working relationship. He always treated me with respect and I never had any reason to believe he was racist”.
The Liberal Democrats have announced that they will be investigating the claims made against Mr Jack and will report their findings at a later date.
UPDATE (2011): After a lengthy police investigation, including inspection of his IT equipment, David Jack was completely cleared of the claim that he had sent a racist email. He has subsequently rejoined the party and is standing as a candidate in May’s elections.
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18 Comments
Does anyone really believe Jack is the innocent victim in all of this?
It’s entirely possible. The evidence, as far as I can see it, is that the email purports to come from his email address.
It is exceedingly easy to send email that claims to come from someone else’s account. A small child could do it.
Is there any evidence that David Jack is racist?
It’s actually not that hard for somebody to come up with compelling (albeit circumstantial) evidence about this sort of thing, one way or another; while emails can trivially be forged well enough to convince a typical user, it is prohibitively hard to convince an expert. I’m a little surprised this hasn’t already been done, it shouldn’t take more than an hour or so.
The very fact that the headers of the email have not yet been published suggests to me that this is probably a smear.
I hope it is but consider it wise for David Jack to have stepped down in the mean time.
If this shocking email did indeed come from Mr Jack then he should be expelled from the party immediately. However, it’s entirely possible that he has been set up…
According to Channel 4 News he claims to have been “out on the lash” at the time the email was sent.
Sounds like a superb candidate all round then.
If getting pissed every now and again disqualified you from running for public office, I don’t think there’d be many MPs or councillors of any party still in the job (ignoring that “out on the lash” could easily be journo-speak for “in a pub – he could have been drinking orange juice, shandy or downing 20 pints, we’ve absolutely no idea.”).
We are right to take a very tough line on this. Not only is racism unacceptable in a liberal party, but also we have been very quick to condemn racism in other parties. If David had not stood down we would have to suspend him and investigate this immediately, expelling him if it proved to be ture.
Having said that, this is a very difficult situation, because David is denying responsibility. Even if the email was sent from his account, it is not impossible that it was a fit-up (accounts can be hacked). However, that would be very hard to prove and I am afraid that this is an area where the presumption of guilt reigns.
You may be sure of one thing: there will be no apology from Ch4 if he is exonerated.
There is no need to hack an account to send an email with a faked ‘From:’ line. It is quite literally child’s play.
The Channel 4 report suggested that “out on the lash” was a direct quote. If that’s the case (and I find it hard to imagine them choosing that phrase otherwise), then I think it demonstrates a remarkable lack of judgement.
@Luke Bosman: You are right about the ease for forging subject lines (maybe we should all use PHP signatures?)
But according to the Channel4 article: “Channel 4 News Political Correspondent Cathy Newman has spoken to Mr Jack, who denies sending the email…although he admits it did come from his official email account.”
Clearly Mr Jack has checked and found it in his outbox. So that leaves two possibilities: 1) he sent it, and 2) his account was hacked. Neither is attractive.
The lack of security of e-mail should be taken more seriously. Also, candidates and MPs who will be dealing with casework should not use an unsecure means of communication – if possible they should use encrypted e-mail, which also has the advantage of PHP signatures that prove that it came from your account.
@Niklas Smith: I don’t know how well Mr Jack understands email. It may be that he believes it must have come from his official email account since it has his ‘From:’ line. However, without the headers we are only speculating.
I entirely agree that PHP signatures would be a sensible means of authenticating emails. Sadly, so few people use them (only one of the people to whom I send emails uses them and she’s my wife) that it’s pretty much pointless without a significant awareness-raising effort.
I dunno, I’d caution against taking C4 that literally. In my experience, journalists don’t always have the best grasp of this sort of thing and I’d not be surprised if they took confirmation from him that that was his email address as confirmation that it came from his actual account.
The worst case scenario is (obviously) that he sent it.
The second worst case scenario is that someone else sent it, from his account and on his machine while he was away from it. In which case there is literally no way he will ever be able to prove he didn’t send it.
From addresses can be faked, but not the routing info. Also, to further muddy the waters, anyone with a decent 3G phone can send email from a pub – you’re not tied to a specific machine in order to send email. We also don’t know who has the username and password of this “official” email account – what does “official email account” mean in this context? His personal email, his PPC email account? If the latter, the login details may be known to more than one person. On the other hand, if it was hacked into, the ISP will surely have a record of repeated failed attempts to login?
A really murky story.
This from the Guardian (repeating what Jack told the BBC) appears to contradict C4:
“He said: “I’m not acknowledging it came from my official email address at all.
“There are specialist IT people looking into that at this moment and I await their investigations on that. But I can categorically say that I did not type or send that email.” ”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jan/20/lib-dem-candidate-email-row
The sundry spelling mistakes and solecisms (including a failure to use the subjunctive in the opening sentence) do not look as though they come from the pen of a Lib Dem PPC. This is the kind of thing an angry drunk of below average intelligence would write. I would be most surprised if Mr Jack had anything to do with it.
I live in this seat. David has a lot of friends here.
http://www.pitsnpots.co.uk/news/2010/01/david-jack-resigns-ppc-stoke-trent-north-and-chair-local-lib-dems
Can Mr Jack spell? Can he construct a reasonable sentence? What is his habitual vocabulary? The spelling and semantics used can show whether a text was written by the person in question or not; it’s not just a case of the technicalities of email construction that need to be investigated. Our spoken and written words and the way they are put together follow a personal pattern. This does indeed vary according to our audience – formal, informal, to a friend, a child or an adult we don’t know. However certain structures, vocabulary and nuances, not to mention spelling are consistent in whatever we write.