THE TOXIC, SCANDAL-HIT leadership of Matt Wrack came back to haunt the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) last week after a newspaper exposé into the former general secretary’s personal relationship with a Labour MP.
The story, first published in the Mail on Sunday and then picked up by the BBC and other outlets, alleged that Mary Foy, the MP for the City of Durham, may have broken parliamentary rules after lobbying for the union without declaring her romantic relationship with Wrack. Foy has since referred herself to the parliamentary commissioner for standards.
But, more importantly for FBU members, Wrack himself appears to have serious questions to answer. For example, it was revealed that the union made a donation of £2,000 to the office of Foy after her relationship with Wrack began. In addition, a full-time FBU staffer was sent to work for the MP.
This blog has discovered that the staffer in question was the union’s political engagement officer, Matilda (‘Tillie’) Muir. Muir – against whom this blog levels no criticism – began employment with the FBU in January 2023. But the parliamentary register of interests of members’ staff shows that within 10 months of joining the union she had been loaned to Foy. She continued providing assistance to the MP for around 15 months.
Sources have told this blog that the union’s executive council did not approve the decision to send Muir to work for Foy. But did executive council members even know about it? And, if they did, were they aware that Wrack was in an intimate relationship with Foy at the time? Did they ever ask questions about staff attendance and deployment. If not, why not? Shouldn’t the executive council satisfy itself as a matter of routine that employees, whose wages are paid by members, are dedicating themselves full-time to the service of the union?
On the surface, the whole affair seems extremely grubby. The union’s money and resources should not have been used to support the office of a member of parliament who happened to be in a romantic relationship with the general secretary at the time. Given the obvious conflict of interest, these decisions ought at least to have been the subject of the closest scrutiny.
Wrack – who is now vying to be the £134k-a-year permanent head of the NASUWT – certainly has form for this sort of thing. In 2021, this blog revealed that another FBU staffer had been sent to work for a left-wing pressure group – Momentum – whose governing body happened to count Wrack himself as a member. Once again, there was no evidence that the decision had been approved by the executive council.
This blog regularly criticised Wrack for treating the union and its resources as his own personal property while he was general secretary. We were instrumental in exposing the ‘hush money’ affair, which centred on secret payments to a string of departing union employees – some of whom had made direct allegations of bullying against Wrack. In a report published earlier this year, the government’s trade union regulator slammed the-then leadership for a failure of governance and oversight in relation to the payments. The latest allegations surrounding the donation of money and staffing resources to Foy merely add to the impression that Wrack was out of control while in charge of the union.
Wrack may be gone, but his damaging legacy remains – and will probably do so for some time. The current leadership must ensure that the scandals that occurred during the final years of his tenure are not repeated. And that will mean executive council members asking the right questions, demanding answers and providing proper oversight and scrutiny – something which for many years they failed to do.