Starmer blow as shadow minister quits at conference
LABOUR was plunged into fresh infighting last night as a member of Sir Keir Starmer’s top team quit, accusing him of making the party ‘more divided than ever’.
Andy McDonald resigned from the Shadow Cabinet less than 48 hours before the leader’s keynote conference speech in which he will argue that Labour has come together again after the disastrous Corbyn years.
In a parting blast, the party’s employment rights spokesman told Sir Keir: ‘I joined your frontbench team on the basis of the pledges that you made in the leadership campaign to bring about unity within the party and maintain our commitment to socialist policies.
‘After 18 months of your leadership, our movement is more divided than ever and the pledges that you made to the memthey bership are not being honoured.’
Mr McDonald, one of the last survivors of Jeremy Corbyn’s top team, said the final straw came when a member of the leader’s office ordered him to argue against calls for the minimum wage to be raised to £15 an hour.
‘This is something I could not do,’ Mr McDonald wrote in his resignation letter.
‘After many months of a pandemic when we made commitments to stand by key workers, I cannot now look those same workers in the eye and tell them are not worth a wage that is enough to live on.’
Mr McDonald’s resignation threatens to overshadow Sir Keir’s efforts to present Labour as a united, electable force.
Tory party chairman Oliver Dowden said Labour was ‘divided and fighting among themselves – now they are even resigning during their own party conference’.
He added: ‘Labour’s conference gets more chaotic by the minute. How can people trust them to run the country?’ Allies of Sir Keir suggested Mr McDonald’s departure was a deliberate effort by the Left to wreck the conference.
Former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer said it was ‘maybe deliberately intended to distract from the progress Keir is making’.
It followed changes to Labour’s internal rules designed to make it harder for the Left to ever seize power again.
Lord Mandelson said the changes meant the ‘sort of avalanche of people who were allowed in the Labour Party to back one far-Left candidate they wanted to see elected leader, that will no longer be allowed to happen’.
Former Unite union boss Len McCluskey said Mr McDonald’s resignation was evidence that Sir Keir had ‘abandoned the radical platform’ he was elected on.
He added: ‘It’s a blow to Andy, and it’s a blow to Keir, and it’s a blow to the party.’
At a rally in Brighton, Labour MP Zarah Sultana criticised the ‘Blairite clique running the show’ and told the party’s Left to continue to push for its policies.
Privately, Labour sources said Mr McDonald would not be considered a loss to the Shadow Cabinet. But Sir Keir thanked him for his work and insisted Labour’s ‘new deal for working people’ shows the ‘scale of our ambition and where our priorities lie’.
Meanwhile, the party’s deputy leader Angela Rayner continued to stoke the row over her description of senior Tories as ‘scum’, despite some colleagues distancing themselves from her remarks.
Mrs Rayner said she would not apologise until Boris Johnson said sorry for alleged ‘racist, homophobic and sexist’ comments in the past.
Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves refused to condone her rant, saying it was ‘not the sort of language I use’.
Labour’s international trade spokesman Emily Thornberry suggested ‘there may have been drink partaken’ at the fringe meeting on Saturday where Mrs Rayner launched into her tirade.
‘People just need to know the atmosphere – it was not a sitting around, considered debate,’ she said. She told the BBC: ‘She probably shouldn’t have said scum, but the rest of it – of course.’
But in a boost for Sir Keir, Dame Louise Ellman announced she was rejoining the party, having left in protest against anti-Semitism under Mr Corbyn’s leadership.
She said she was able to return to her ‘political home’ now that it was ‘led by a man of principle in whom the British people and Britain’s Jews can have trust’.
‘More chaotic by the minute’