Labour split over Kezia’s Celebrity jaunt to the jungle

New Scots leader resists call to suspend Dugdale

whether to suspend his predecessor when he chairs his first meeting of his MSPs since defeating rival Anas Sarwar to become leader on Saturday.

On Saturday, he initially insisted that, while suspension was not his ‘initial reaction’, it would be up to MSPs to decide. However, after Mr Corbyn said suspension was not appropriate, Mr Leonard yesterday insisted he did not back calls to kick her out of the party.

Mr Leonard said: ‘I’m disappointed that she has chosen to do that, but it’s something we need consider as a group or party. The calls for her to be suspended are not calls that I support. It’s a distraction.’

Campaigning in Rutherglen, Lanarkshire, he expressed frustration about the media asking him about Miss Dugdale. He spoke of the ‘real and important issues that people will be speaking to us about when we go round this community today and not about who’s in the jungle and who’s not’.

During the BBC’s Sunday Politics Scotland show, Mr Findlay launched a scathing attack on Miss Dugdale for her decision. He said: ‘I think it’s utterly ludicrous, a ludicrous position.

‘We have a situation where we’re in the run-up to the budget in Scotland, where local government is on its knees, where the NHS is showing pressures like never before, when people’s living standards are falling and they expect their elected representatives to be in fighting on their behalf and I don’t think people would expect them to sit around the camp fire eating a kangaroo’s appendage.

‘I think it demeans politics when people get involved in that.’

Miss Dugdale is expected to make her first appearance on I’m A Celebrity later this week. It is understood she has known for several weeks that she would be taking part.

She is planning to donate her MSP salary in full to charity while she is away, as well as a portion of the five-figure appearance fee she will receive.

A source close to Miss Dugdale said she had expected her decision to spark a backlash from ‘some in the party’ but expects them to ‘come round when they realise the benefits of being able to talk to millions of voters every night about Labour values’.

Responding to Mr Findlay’s comments, the source said: ‘Kez slogged her guts out for the party for two years, often with little support. At the very least, MSPs in the party should accept that she can take three weeks off given the amount of work she has done for the party and her constituents. I’m sure Neil Findlay spent considerably more on his second job of writing a book.’

If Labour MSPs opt to suspend Miss Dugdale, she would become an independent MSP. She would then have to make her case for remaining in the party when she returns from the jungle.

Friends of Miss Dugdale insist that she has ‘absolutely no intention’ of standing down as an MSP.

Economy Secretary Keith Brown told the BBC: ‘She will not be breaching, as I understand it, any of the rules in the Scottish parliament but it’s a question of how her party views her absence from her primary job.’

A WOMAN has accused a former Scots Labour MP of sexually assaulting her as his wife sat across the table at a dinner.

Carol Hughes, a Labour councillor between 1995 and 2007 in Lanarkshire, said the senior party figure put his hand up her dress and caressed her thigh at a dinner.

The 60-year-old told the Sunday Herald she felt ‘degraded’ but did not wish to ‘cause a scene’.

She said she is now considering making a formal complaint.

A Labour spokesman said: ‘We would urge anyone in the Party to make use of the reporting mechanisms that have been set up.’

Jungle secrets – Pages 20-21

‘Kez slogged her guts out for party’