Plan B Forum

Police last night launched an investigation into Labour’s favourite banker after he was caught buying crystal meth and crack cocaine.

The Reverend Paul Flowers, a Methodist minister who used to head the Co-operative Bank, was covertly filmed counting off £20 notes to buy hard drugs. He bragged of getting ‘wasted’ following his grilling by MPs over the near-collapse of the bank, which threatens the retirement income of thousands of pensioners. Flowers was £132,000-a-year chairman of the ‘ethical’ bank, which has lent £34million to Labour over two decades. But in June he stepped down from this post and as deputy chairman of the Co-operative Group as the scale of the bank’s financial problems became clear.

It lost £700million in the first six months of the year and a £1.5billion black hole was discovered in its finances.

His woeful testimony to MPs earlier this month about the bank’s disastrous performance can now be seen in the context of his enthusiasm for crack cocaine, the powerful tranquilliser ketamine and the ‘club drug’ GHB. He boasted in a text message of ‘snorting some good stuff’ on the day he was due to appear before the Commons Treasury Select Committee, October 29, although in the end he was not called until a week later.

In another text, he wrote how his plans for a party were ‘turning into a two-day, drug fuelled gay orgy!!!’.

Flowers, 63, who is openly gay, lives in a modest detached house in Bradford, West Yorkshire. He has apologised to ‘all those I have hurt or failed’ after his double life was exposed. In a video obtained by the Mail on Sunday, he was seen in his car discussing the cocaine and crystal meth he wanted from a dealer in Leeds. He then counted out £300 in £20 notes and sent a friend to make the deal. West Yorkshire Police last night confirmed they had begun an inquiry into possible criminal charges against Flowers, who has gone into hiding.

The scandal is an acute embarrassment for Labour and its 32 MPs who are sponsored by the Co-op Group. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has received £50,000 in donations from the Co-op, which prides itself on its ethical stance. MPs on the Treasury committee have now demanded that Flowers, a former Labour councillor, appear before them again. Flowers used to chair the drugs charity Lifeline, whose motto is ‘telling the truth about drugs’. He was exposed by an acquaintance called Stuart Davies, who was ‘disgusted by his hypocrisy’ and secretly filmed him on an iPhone buying drugs a week ago.

Mr Davies, 26, met Flowers in October through Grindr, a gay dating mobile phone app. He said: ‘After hearing him bragging about his life, about his connections in Parliament, his 40 years in the church and his all-round good works, it just felt wrong. He seemed to be using his status to get young men off their heads for sex.’ Mr Davies claimed that when they got back to Flowers’ house last weekend, ‘there was the biggest rock of cocaine I have ever seen in my life... Paul got a tumbler and began crushing it’. He added that the minister ‘was drinking pink champagne and dropping GHB into it’. He said Flowers held another party at which he produced ‘a metal tray which had cocaine on one side and ketamine on the other’.

Mr Davies said: ‘We asked him about how he kept his drug taking secret and he laughed and said that a Labour MP had passed him in the corridors and said, “Have you got a touch of the old Colombian flu?”. 'He laughed. He also told us he knew Tony Blair, especially back in 1997. He just seemed to know everybody.’