Party suspends journalist working for Iran TV channel

A JOURNALIST working for Iran’s state-sponsored broadcaster has been suspended from the Labour Party after he allegedly used his membership to infiltrate and film a vote of no confidence against a pro-israel MP, The Daily Telegraph has been told.

Robert Carter, who joined Labour during the 2015 leadership hustings, is now being investigated by Labour’s compliance unit after footage of a constituency party meeting was broadcast by Press TV.

It comes days after this newspaper revealed that Mr Carter had been accused of filming a meeting of Joan Ryan MP’S Enfield North constituency party, despite journalists and film crews being banned from the event.

The vote was called amid a string of similar motions against other moderate MPS who have been openly critical of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, which critics in Labour have branded a “purge”.

The footage was later broadcast by Press TV, which was stripped of its UK licence by Ofcom in 2012, prompting an outcry from Labour MPS and Tom Watson, the party’s deputy leader, who warned the controversy made a “farce of the proceedings”.

According to Siddo Dwyer, the constituency chairman, officials present at the vote were unaware that Mr Carter was a journalist and he was formally warned that he should not record the count.

As a local party member, Mr Carter would have also been able to cast a ballot in the vote, which Ms Ryan lost 94-92, although it is unclear whether he did so.

Ahead of the meeting, Mr Carter wrote in a recent Facebook post that Ms Ryan and Dame Margaret Hodge, a veteran Labour MP, needed to be “dealt with, once and for all”, for their “endless attacks” on Mr Corbyn.

Ms Ryan, who is the chairman of the Labour Friends of Israel, and who has been an MP since 1997, described the incident as an “appalling infiltration” and claimed that she had been singled out by the broadcaster because of her support for the Jewish state.

A Labour Party spokesman said: “We do not comment on individual cases.”