Party on down! When Oona King, Labour’s beat-loving politician, got married she danced her wedding night away at the capital’s Ministry of Sound nightclub, dressed in a silver baby-doll dress and matching platform shoes.
Now she is going back to the club to try to pay for her failed attempt to win the Labour candidacy to become the next mayor of London. Her star attraction: Ed Miliband, the party leader.
King has told guests in a letter of invitation to a fundraising dinner at the Ministry of Sound that she will go bankrupt and risks being thrown out of the House of Lords as a result if they do not stump up £100 each for a ticket.
Her disastrous campaign to beat Ken Livingstone for the nomination for London mayor saddled the former MP with tens of thousands of pounds of debt, which she has not paid off almost 10 months after the campaign ended.
To raise the remaining £20,000 she owes, King has booked the trendy London nightclub for a bash.
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“I know how to party,” she says in the invitation. “This will be the most entertaining fundraiser you’ve ever been to. There will be comedians, singers, playwrites [sic], artists and, er politicians.”
The newly elevated Baroness King of Bow knows how to burn the candle at both ends. The book of her diaries as an MP was called House Music and she once said: “I need beats in my life.”
Cash is now an even more pressing requirement. She is hoping the Labour hierarchy will turn out to support her to help reduce her overdraft.
At school she knew both Miliband brothers; David was in the year above her and Ed a year below at Haverstock school in north London. In his first conference speech as Labour leader, Ed Miliband disclosed that she was too cool to hang out with them. Other former pupils include members of the pop group Madness.
King’s invitation verges on the desperate. Suicide is even mentioned. She writes: “Saying ‘yes!’ will no doubt be the best social decision you make this year. Oh, and you’ll stop me killing myself.”
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King, who was given a peerage by Ed Miliband in January, insists the suicide threat is a joke, but it has shocked some MPs who received it.
Her other claim that she may be kicked out of the Lords as a bankrupt if they do not help raise the money has also dismayed some friends.
“It’s a fundraising dinner, and if I’m lucky it will prevent me being kicked out of the House of Lords on bankruptcy charges (just when I’d started to get used to the baroness thing),” the letter says.
“Unfortunately democracy costs a fortune, and I still owe substantial sums from last year’s Labour London mayoral selection campaign.”
She insists the bankruptcy claim is tongue in cheek, and she will not really go broke.
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Friends say they did not know what to think. “I was a bit shocked,” said one. “She says she might be kicked out of the Lords and she has just arrived.”
Last night King defended her fundraising methods. “It is a joke. Obviously I’m not going to kill myself and I’m not going to go bankrupt. The majority of this debt is from people who made pledges to my campaign and did not deliver on them.”
Her nomination campaign attracted £56,500 in donations from celebrities, businessmen and rich MP friends.
Among those who have stumped up are Simon Schama, the historian, with £2,000, and Waheed Alli, the Labour peer and businessman, who will both be on the guest list.
But the cost of fighting Livingstone came to almost £100,000 and he easily saw off her challenge for the chance to contest the mayoralty against Boris Johnson next year.
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King, the daughter of a white Jewish mother and a black American civil rights activist father, had hoped the race would mark her re-entry into the front line of Labour politics.
She lost her Bethnal Green & Bow parliamentary seat in the 2005 general election to the left-wing firebrand George Galloway, leader of the Respect party, after an acrimonious campaign in which she was given police protection and was subjected to anti-semitic abuse by Galloway supporters.