Rosie Duffield’s decision to leave the Labour Party had been coming “for quite a long time”, a senior minister has said as he rejected the MP’s claims the Government was not motivated by public service.
The Canterbury MP resigned the Labour whip on Saturday, citing both “cruel and unnecessary” policies such as the two-child benefit cap and the ongoing row about gifts and hospitality received by Sir Keir Starmer and other senior party figures.
In her resignation letter to the Prime Minister, Ms Duffield said: “The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale. I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party.”
Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg he was “disappointed” but “not surprised” by her decision.
He said: “When I read Rosie’s letter last night and listened to the interview there, I think you can see she has been disillusioned with the party leader, maybe the party more generally, for quite a long time.
“I don’t think this is something that just developed in the last few months.”
Other Labour MPs have gone further, with one backbencher describing her as “poisonous” and saying the leadership were “at least doing something right if they never talk to her”.
Relations between Ms Duffield and the Labour leadership have long been strained, particularly on the issue of transgender rights, and in her letter she criticised a lack of engagement with the Parliamentary Labour Party.
In an interview with the BBC, she claimed the Prime Minister had “a problem with women”, saying he was surrounded by a group she and other female backbenchers had dubbed “the lads”.
She added: “It’s very clear that the lads are in charge.”
Ms Duffield also criticised Sir Keir for accepting gifts of free clothes from Labour donor Waheed Alli, saying: “When you have got people with so much more money than the average person spending somebody’s yearly salary on their own clothes without feeling like they have to apologise or explain, I just feel like I’m not getting anywhere with trying to get that from my leader and I needed to go.”
But Mr McFadden rejected this characterisation of Labour ministers and denied that “the lads” were in charge, saying members of the Cabinet “believe in public service”.
He went on to tell the BBC that Labour would be tightening the rules on declaring ministerial donations to bring them in line with those governing shadow ministers.
Currently, departments publish details of hospitality and gifts received by ministers in their ministerial capacity, but much less frequently than shadow ministers’ parliamentary registers of interest are updated and without details of how much the donations cost.
In her letter, Ms Duffield said she now intended to sit as an Independent MP “guided by my core Labour values”, bringing the total number of Independents to 14.
