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A prominent politician has attacked two of Labour’s Deputy Leaders for causing them problems, The Eye can reveal.
A senior member of the party in Wales told us: “We are doing so much so well and way ahead in the polls for the General Election, but we are shooting ourselves in the foot with all this stuff about Carolyn here and Angela at a UK level.
“My postbag is full of complaints from people in my constituency who say it may affect how they vote.”
The comment refers to Welsh Labour’s (WL) Deputy Leader, Carolyn Harris, who was pictured apparently asleep in the House of Commons (HoC), as well as the problems besetting Sir Keir Starmer’s Deputy, Angela Rayner, over the sale of her former council house.
The photograph of Ms Harris has caused outrage online with one voter, Nick Smith of Newport proclaiming: “What a joke of a woman. It looks ridiculous – no wonder people take the p*ss out of our country”.
However her own website appears to belie the picture, because she declares: “In Parliament I am an all action (our italics) campaigner…”.
Meanwhile it has emerged that the police have now launched a formal investigation into Ms Rayner, after she came under the spotlight over the sale of an ex-council house she previously owned in Stockport.
The new probe comes after James Daly, deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, made Greater Manchester Police (GMP) aware of neighbours contradicting her statement that a property, separate from her husband’s, was her main residency.
Ms Rayner has been accused of avoiding Capital Gains Tax (CGT) on the profit (something she has denied), and is said to have given different addresses on the electoral roll and on two birth certificates.
Her problems have been compounded by information given to the police from a former aide that she hasn’t been entirely honest. The Mail on Sunday didn’t beat about the bush, and the front page headline screamed: “SHE IS LYING…”.
Matt Finnegan, Ms Rayner’s former chief adviser, has given a statement to GMP in which he says that her actual home was with her then husband – not at the former council house where she was registered on the electoral roll.
Her behaviour has featured, too, in a piece in the Sunday Times (ST) at the weekend. The columnist Robert Colvile wrote: “…the real question is about transparency, not criminality – because she has spent so long clinging to a position that she has utterly failed to prove.”.
Ms Rayner was described yesterday in The Guardian as “embattled”, and the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer told MPs he believed the accusation that she had lied about her primary residence to avoid tax was a “smear”.
But Ms Rayner is defiant, and has stated that she was “completely confident I’ve followed the rules at all times“.
Yet the message from the electorate also appears to be confident, and could even affect the party in Wales: ‘These are issues which may make it difficult to vote Labour…’
The memories of our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry’s, extraordinary decades long award-winning career in journalism (including exposing things about prominent politicians that they would rather weren’t exposed) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
Another book, though, has not been published because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – how reports today that the disgraced newsreader Huw Edwards has now taken sanctuary in Wales, highlight once more the enormity of what took place.
