(Bloomberg) -- A Member of Parliament quit the UK’s governing Labour Party, unleashing a deeply personal attack on Prime Minister Keir Starmer and slamming the “staggering” revelations of hypocrisy under his leadership.
In an excoriating resignation letter, Rosie Duffield, elected Canterbury’s first ever Labour MP in 2017, criticized Starmer for “inexplicably accepting expensive gifts of designer suits and glasses” while at the same time slashing winter fuel payments to pensioners and refusing to reverse an unpopular Conservative cut to child benefits.
“Since the change of government in July, the revelations of hypocrisy have been staggering and increasingly outrageous,” Duffield wrote in the letter published by the Times newspaper. “How dare you take our longed-for victory, the electorate’s sacred and precious trust, and throw it back in their individual faces and the faces of dedicated and hardworking Labour MPs? The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale.”
Duffield’s departure won’t affect the Parliamentary balance — Labour will still have a working majority of 165. But while she’s long been at odds with Starmer, particularly over the clash she saw between women’s rights and his position on trans rights, her resignation so soon after Labour swept to an enormous parliamentary majority in the July 4 election is damaging to the premier because it exposes wider rifts in the governing party.
The lawmaker hinted at that, saying “I cannot put into words how angry I and my colleagues are at your total lack of understanding about how you have made us all appear.”
The Labour Party didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but cabinet minister Pat McFadden told the BBC that he liked Duffield and was “disappointed” she’d quit the party.
“There are some squalls at the moment, but this is a government with a big agenda,” McFadden said. “Some of the stuff in the letter I just don’t accept. I see ministers turning up at work every day and what’s on their mind is how to stabilize the economy and get it growing again, how to turn around the NHS, how to get more houses built, how to improve rights of work for people, how to get more opportunity into schools.”
Revelations about the scale of donations accepted by Starmer and his cabinet colleagues in the run-up to the election have been at the root of the party’s recent woes. The prime minister accepted thousands of pounds worth of clothes from a Labour peer and donor, Waheed Alli, for himself and his wife, as well as tickets for concerts and football matches from other donors. Alli also previously paid for birthday celebrations for Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, and allowed Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner to use his flat in New York.
McFadden said Labour would change parliamentary rules that currently mean that ministers don’t have to declare hospitality, while shadow ministers do. “This is a Tory loophole brought in so that you’d have an event where the Tory minister, as it was under the last government, would be there, the Labour’s shadow opposite number would also be there: the Tory minister wouldn’t have to declare,” he said.
In her three-page missive, Duffield criticized Starmer’s “cruel and unnecessary” policies that “affect hundreds of thousands of our poorest, most vulnerable constituents,” which she said was “not even wise politics.”
She also slammed the premier for his “deeply shameful” treatment of the country’s first black woman MP, Diane Abbott; his lack of engagement with his own backbench MPs; use of “heavy handed management tactics”; and his “frankly embarrassing” promotion of those with “no proven political skills.” She also said she hoped to be able return to Labour one day.
“As prime minister, your managerial and technocratic approach, and lack of basic politics and political instincts have come crashing down on us as a party after we worked so hard, promised so much, and waited a long fourteen years to be mandated by the British public to return to power,” Duffield wrote. “I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party.”
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