Long-Bailey ‘ lied about working until 3am on Bill’

LABOUR leadership contender Rebecca Long-Bailey has been accused of lying about working through the night to prepare for a crucial Commons hearing.

The hard-Left candidate told an event at the weekend she had stayed up until 3am in 2016 after the resignation of an anti-Corbyn MP left the party’s Treasury team in the lurch.

She claimed she worked into the early hours to prepare for a committee hearing on the Finance Bill ‘the next day’ and boasted ‘I was pretty good if I’m honest’.

But Hansard, the official parliamentary record, shows that the meeting took place five days after Rob Marris quit as a shadow minister in June 2016.

Labour MP Neil Coyle, who backed former leadership rival Jess Phillips, tweeted it was ‘extraordinary to think such a brazen lie will go unnoticed’.

Yesterday the shadow business secretary won the support of the Communication Workers’ Union to replace Jeremy Corbyn as the party’s leader.

In a speech to activists on Saturday, Miss Long-Bailey described events after Mr Marris resigned from the Labour front bench part-way through work to analyse the Finance Bill. She said she spoke to shadow chancellor John McDonnell and vowed to finish working on the Bill.

‘I sat in that office until about 3am going through all the clauses,’ she said. ‘Richard Burgon was dragged in at one point. Angela Rayner was dragged in and she got us a Domi

Pizza: Rebecca Long-Bailey no’s pizza because we were starving.

‘And we got through the clauses and we went to the Finance Bill committee the next day fully prepared, and I was pretty good if I’m honest.’

However, the committee rose after Mr Marris’s resignation on June 30, and did not sit again until July 5.

A spokesman for Miss Long-Bailey said that after Mr Marris resigned ‘it became apparent that Rebecca alone would have to respond to the remainder of the Bill’.

He said: ‘Rebecca recalls her and her staff having to work all through the weekend including during the night until 3am each day until the next sitting day, which commenced on Tuesday at 9am.’

He added that Miss Long-Bailey was praised by Tory committee member David Gauke for her ‘thoroughness and determination’.

Miss Long-Bailey has previously claimed she grew up watching her father worrying about his job at Salford docks in Greater Manchester - even though they closed when she was two. And in 2014 she said she had worked as a ‘solicitor with the NHS’ for ten years – although she had only been qualified for six and a half.

‘I was pretty good if I’m honest’