Nick Clegg was engulfed in a blizzard of fresh legal threats yesterday as the Lord Rennard furore spiralled out of control.
While the LibDem peer appeared set to launch an injunction against the party, an alleged victim turned the tables by threatening to sue Lord Rennard in the civil courts.
Bridget Harris, a former adviser to Deputy Premier Clegg, said she would not rule out legal action against the peer, who she says touched her legs and knees inappropriately over a cup of coffee in 2003.
“We’re taking the process one step at a time,” she said. “In terms of civil action, how can I possibly say what I would or wouldn’t do, depending on the circumstances?”
The peer met his lawyer Lord Carlile yesterday morning to consider a possible bid to torpedo the Liberal Democrats’ latest investigation into whether he brought the party into disrepute.
An injunction halting such action pending a review could be served within 48 hours, revealed friends.
One said that Harris’s threat to sue showed Lord Rennard had been right to refuse to apologise in the first place, and added: “It confirms what Lord Rennard thought, which is that if he did apologise, not that he thinks he should, he would have laid himself open to civil legal action.”
The nightmare prospect of an expensive and morale-sapping series of legal disputes follows a series of fudged attempts by Clegg’s party to make the scandal go away.
Lord Rennard, the former party chief executive regarded as the LibDems’ greatest election strategist, denies he behaved inappropriately towards the women. Initially, the complaints were handled informally by Clegg’s team which hoped to hush up the affair. However, that backfired when the angry women went public, humiliating Clegg.
The party then called an inquiry by QC Alistair Webster, but the outcome last week was another muddle. It ruled that there was not enough evidence to justify disciplinary action, but recommended Lord Rennard apologise for making the women feel uncomfortable. He refused, saying he could not admit guilt he did not feel, resulting in his suspension on Monday night and a new investigation that could lead to him being expelled altogether from the party.
Harris backed the new action, ordered by a special committee. “I’m very glad now that the party has recognised that, as women, and the complaints that we’ve made, we’ve been listened to,” she told the BBC.
“They’ve been acknowledged and the party leadership has been prepared to, essentially, back our position, which is that we are owed an apology and it isn’t tenable for Lord Rennard to remain a member of the Lib-Dems for as long as these allegations and this cloud hangs over him.”
She said the Liberal Democrats had “manifestly failed over a period of 10 years” to handle the matter, and party loyalties would not make the women back down. “I don’t see any reason why party loyalty should come into it,” she said.
“I’m perfectly loyal to the LibDems and their policies and Nick Clegg and the coalition government — I’m perfectly loyal to the Liberal cause.”
A friend of Lord Rennard rejected the new investigation. “It is not a new inquiry at all - it is a re-run of the original one,” the friend said. “They were not happy with the original findings so they are running it again.” He said Lord Rennard’s next step would probably be to appoint a specialist QC to take up his case. An option was to serve an injunction to make the party halt its action.
Meanwhile, senior LibDems are in turmoil over the situation. Lord Greaves called it a “nightmare” and added: “It’s doing a lot of damage and it is getting worse by the day”. In an emotional statement of more than 2,600 words, Lord Rennard said he had suffered depression and considered “self-harm”, but insisted people should not be forced “to say what they know they should not say, or do not mean”.