Corbyn sidekick accused of raid on rebel MP’s of f ice
AN AIDE to Jeremy Corbyn once implicated in a voterigging scandal has been accused of a break-in at a Labour MP’s office.
Karie Murphy, the Labour leader’s office manager, allegedly twice entered the parliamentary office of Seema Malhotra – who quit the shadow cabinet last month in protest at Mr Corbyn’s leadership – when she was not there.
Miss Murphy, who is close to Len McCluskey, head of Unite, was at the centre of a row over Labour’s selection of an election candidate in Falkirk amid claims of vote rigging by the union in Scotland.
Miss Malhotra, the former shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said members of her staff who were in the office at the time of the alleged break-in felt ‘harassed and intimidated’ and could no longer work there alone.
Two aides visited her office twice in 48 hours, it was claimed. One of them was allegedly Miss Murphy and the other was an unnamed office manager of shadow chancellor John McDonnell, Miss Malhotra’s former boss.
Miss Malhotra, the MP for Feltham and Heston, told The Observer: ‘The implications of this are extremely serious. This is a breach of parliamentary privilege and is a violation of the privacy, security and confidentiality of a Member of Parliament’s office. My staff, including an intern, who have always been courteous and open, have felt harassed, intimidated and insecure and decided themselves it would be best to not leave anyone alone in the office.
‘I have made a formal complaint to the Speaker of the Commons and to Jeremy Corbyn MP, and requested an investigation into how this could have happened.’ In a letter to Speaker John Bercow, she said the aide ‘kept referring to my staff as “girls”, which made them feel insulted and patronised’.
She added: ‘These incidents have frightened my staff, including a new intern, who have become concerned about their safety and, as such, took the decision that no member of staff is to be left alone in the office.
‘As this is a serious breach of parliamentary privilege, I would be grateful if an urgent and thorough investigation is undertaken into the actions of these individuals and any other associated parties.’
MPs’ offices can only be entered without their consent by police who obtain a search warrant.
Mr McDonnell said: ‘We thought she had moved out of her office – my office manager saw boxes outside her office and thought she had moved.’ He told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show yesterday: ‘I’ve got a
‘Concerned about their safety’
member of staff... she’s now worried she’s going to lose her job and face prosecution because it’s been described as a break-in. That’s just so distressing – it’s unacceptable.’
One Labour source who backs Mr Corbyn accused Miss Malhotra of a ‘cheap attack on the leadership by targeting their innocent staff’.
The source added: ‘She already has another parliamentary office – why she needs two is a mystery but she has refused numerous offers to move. She has been squatting in the office for a month now despite having a perfectly good one to move into.’
A spokesman for Mr Corbyn said: ‘The claims that Karie intimidated anyone are untrue.
‘As an office manager on the Leader of the Opposition’s floor, Karie has a key to open all offices. She accessed the office in question to confirm when it would be vacated.’
He added it had been a month since Miss Malhotra resigned her shadow cabinet job and the office was for the person holding that position.
Shadow Commons leader Paul Flynn dismissed the complaint, saying on Twitter: ‘Are the cleaners, postmen, admin & security staff who daily use their pass keys to enter MPs’ offices “breaking in”? Time to end piffle.’
In 2013, Miss Murphy was temporarily suspended from Labour after it was claimed that Unite had flooded the Falkirk branch of the party with members in an attempt to get her the nomination.
She voluntarily withdrew from the contest and Labour’s national executive committee found her innocent of any wrongdoing and reinstated her party membership.
When soap operas lose viewers they often turn to more and more implausible plot lines to get them back. In Dallas, JR got shot. In emmerdale, they had a Lockerbie-type plane crash.
In the soap opera that is the Labour Party, its equivalent of an air disaster was electing Jeremy Corbyn. More viewers switched off, so it has had the prolonged assassination of the said leader. Or rather attempted assassination (failed).
It is still a crashing bore. For all the party is gaining cut-price members, it is bleeding supporters. Lidl pricing but Poundstretcher quality. now the saga has taken a Tarantino turn: violent threats and intimidation are part of the core script.
The party which first championed gay rights now has a leader whose supporters use homophobia as a weapon.
Labour, which used to say it matters not where you came from but where you are going, has faced claims of anti-Semitism.
The party which existed for equality bullies women. Forty-four female Labour MPs have complained to Mr Corbyn of bullying and intimidation. Angela eagle puts her head above the parapet and the police tell her that it is not safe for her to hold constituency surgeries. MPs’ offices are allegedly broken into by their own leadership.
The Labour leader will tell you of his mother standing in the battle of Cable Street in 1936, when the Left took on Oswald Mosley’s fascists. And yet the way he conducts his politics has the stench of a Bavarian beer cellar about it.
Destruction
Impassioned pleas made in front of fanatical supporters, violence and threats meted out to opponents – with implausible false sincerity denying any connection with him. And with an Orwellian chill, Mr Corbyn’s enforcer in chief, John McDonnell, looks down the barrel of a TV lens and pleads for ‘unity’ – and the destruction of anyone moderate.
This appears to be the final series of the Labour Party. The concluding episode will make the last scene of hamlet look like The Sound of Music. And when the credits roll we will find out that it all comes from an original idea by ed Miliband.
If only Gordon Brown could come out of the shower and tell viewers it was all a dream. Yet it was he who ensured that ed defeated his brother David to win the party leadership in 2010 – and the road to this place was then defined. Inadequate, inchoate and often incomprehensible, ed was a repertory theatre understudy wrongly made a West end leading man. he couldn’t remember his lines and those he could were hardly memorable. Worse, he lost the plot.
It started in Falkirk. I worked for the Scottish Labour Party when Karie Murphy, a close friend of Unite leader Len McCluskey, tried to win the selection for Falkirk West. The methods employed to gain support then have echoes of the drama we see today.
When I queried the process, a very senior member of the party warned me not to try to stop it, telling me that ed had done a deal with Len and it had to go ahead.
Mr Miliband denied this with all the plausibility of Mr Corbyn saying he’ll be the next prime minister.
When that shambles became public, he came up with the wizard wheeze of letting anyone vote in a Labour Party election if they paid only £3. Lots of people did: Trots, greens, nationalists and even Tories. People who had opposed Labour for years were given a cut-price chance to destroy it. Thousands grasped it and now their task is almost complete. I don’t know who is on David Cameron’s resignation honours list but Mr Miliband deserves to top it for services to the Tory Party.
Can the monster Corbyn be stopped from eating everything in his path?
Step forward Owen Smith, less Bobby ewing and more the unfaithful Dirty Den.
A Blairite under Blair, a Brownite under Brown, now apparently as Left wing as Mr Corbyn. Far from being the future, he is the type of plastic politician of the past who stands for nothing. Tony Blair stood for something: a vision of social justice which the nation gratefully bought into in three elections. his administrations are now dismissed as nothing but spin. But the real lie is the claim there was no conviction underpinning them. There was.
Mr Smith, however, is compelling evidence of the conviction-free politician.
he allowed Miss eagle to be the first one to go over the top and then undermined her by saying that no politician who had voted for the Iraq war could defeat him.
At the time of the Iraq war, Mr Smith was special adviser to Welsh secretary Paul Murphy who was a strong supporter of the military action. Did he resign? Of course he didn’t. he went on to say he supported the war, then asserted it was a difficult decision before claiming to have become a passionate opponent.
Implosion
If John Chilcot finds weapons of mass destruction on a weekend break in Baghdad, he’ll probably support it again.
Mr Smith will lose this leadership bid. What Mr Corbyn believes in is deeply ugly but his opponent only believes in himself – and having met him I can tell you that that is not a lot.
The only option for Labour post-Corbyn’s re-election is for the Parliamentary Labour Party to declare its independence from him and set up its own party. This is a remake of the 1980s classic ‘Labour Implosion’ but this time it looks like ‘Labour Implosion – the Final Conflict’.
We forget that while Michael Foot led the party into the disaster of the 1983 general election, he was still a political giant – and no friend of a Trot like Corbyn.
If Labour was once a show for all the family with an A-list cast, it is now a cheap, violent penny-dreadful whose only claim to authenticity is that it is played out by genuine thugs: class warriors armed with intimidation, sexism and alleged antiSemitism – the very weapons the party was founded to abolish.
Mr Corbyn is a former private schoolboy who well remembers the turmoil of the 1980s when neil Kinnock took on Militant and won.
In 1985, the then Labour leader critiqued the Militant outlook in a famous party conference speech, comparing its supporters to latter-day public schoolboys to whom ‘it matters not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game’.
The only difference now is that the latter-day public schoolboys – detached from reality and the need to win elections – look bound to win.
And win ugly. Deeply ugly.