If you didn’t laugh at this Labour government, you would cry. The Anti-Corruption Minister has resigned over corruption; the Homelessness Minister quit over making people homeless. The Police Transport Minister went after being accused of lying to the police – while the Housing Secretary did not pay £40,000 tax on her house. Now – get this – the minister for inquiries is… the subject of an inquiry!
Yes, that’s right: somehow Josh Simons is still clinging on at the Cabinet Office. The now-MP was formerly the head of the Labour Together think tank when it commissioned a 2023 report into the background of journalists reporting on them. Simons’ claims about what he knew and when are now being pulled apart by the very same journalists who did the initial reporting on Labour Together some three years ago. Talk about irony of ironies…
Over in the Commons, the government is doing its usual ‘nothing to see here guv’ routine. Darren Jones has announced that Sir Laurie Magnus – Starmer’s independent ethics adviser – will be probing the claims. But that is not good enough for several of the Prime Minister’s own backbenchers, with John McDonnell calling it a ‘whitewash’. New boy Brian Leishman meanwhile got up in the House declared that the whole affair was ‘some dark shit’, before being forced to withdraw the remarks by the horrified Speaker.
Not so much Labour Together as Labour Apart…
Comments