Johnson 'took third party donations'

The health secretary has denied any wrongdoing after being accused of accepting funds from a third party donor.

The Sunday Mirror reported that Alan Johnson took £3,334 from student Waseem Siddiqui for his Labour deputy leadership campaign last year on behalf of Siddiqui's brother, a local Labour Party official.

The newspaper claimed this was one of four undeclared donations totalling more than £9,000 to Johnson's unsuccessful campaign.

It said 50-year-old Siddiqui was asked to write the cheque by his brother Ahmed Yar Mohammed, the treasurer of Croydon Central Labour Party, who also only told him to join the party in March last year.

However Johnson's campaign team insisted that it could not have been expected to know Siddiqui was not in fact the donor.

"We had no reason to believe the donation came from anyone other than [Siddiqui]," it said in a statement.

"We checked he was a member of the Labour Party and was on the Electoral Register and we registered the donation with the Labour Party, the register of members' interests and the Electoral Commission."

Johnson insisted that his campaign had been "100 per cent honest".

"We registered everything in accordance with the laws to our best knowledge," he told Sky News.

"We are absolutely clear now from talking to the Electoral Commission that everything we have done was what was required of
us."

Work and pensions secretary James Purnell, who backed Johnson for the deputy leadership job, also defended his cabinet colleague.

"I do think it's been got a bit out of proportion," he told BBC1's Andrew Marr programme.

"This came out because his team were going through the whole of their campaign accounts and just double-checking which entries had appeared on which register.

"They declared all of these to the Labour Party, they paid the levy that you have to pay on them, they declared them to the House of Commons register.

"They believe they have declared them as well to the Electoral Commission, but there were four that turned out not to be on there, so for the avoidance of doubt they re-registered all of those declarations.

"They have been working with the Electoral Commission on this and I don't think there has been wrongdoing."

The funding allegations are the latest in long line against Labour, which has been beset by difficulties over its donations in recent months.

Fellow deputy leadership candidate Peter Hain was forced to resign as work and pensions secretary last week after the late declaration of £103,000 of his funding was referred to the police by the Electoral Commission.

Leader of the Commons Harriet Harman, who narrowly beat Johnson to the deputy's job, is also being investigated over third party donations, which are in breach of electoral law.

Harman's campaign was partly funded by millionaire property developer David Abrahams, who it emerged last year had also given hundreds of thousands of pounds to Labour via proxy donors, leading to the resignation of general secretary Peter Watt.

Liberal Democrat frontbencher Norman Baker said: "This news represents another damaging blow to Gordon Brown's 'new politics'.

"This is another murky situation which will need to be properly investigated if confidence is to be restored."