Will Starmer prevail in his war on 'knobheadery'?
The removal of the whip from these 4 MPs is abold, or brave, move from Prime minister. Very brave indeed at a time when the Labour party is losing votes to the left more than to the right; at a time when comrade Jeremy is thinking about his new party. And looking at that, you've got to be very, very careful about the left now to defend the government on this.
When government sources accused these MPs of 'persistent knobheadery' the persistent bit of it certainly has some validity. I was discussing it all with Brian Leishman, who's a very vocal critic of Keir Starmer, and he said he thought he had rebelled against the government on serious issues at least 12 times. Now, that's a lot. And there comes a point – and it's not just walking through the wrong voting lobby, it's when MPs are criticising Starmer and the cabinet as betraying this and betraying that, in public, on the media, again and again and again. There comes a point when they are not behaving like Labour MPs and therefore taking the whip away from them is not that unreasonable.
I do think there's a slight element of cowardice in this, in that they haven't gone for the most powerful and widely liked critics. They haven't gone for Meg Hillier who is so important on the benefits revolt. Apart from Diane Abbott, they haven't gone for the people who'd cause them real trouble in the media. These are mostly people less well known, and in some cases not particularly popular within their own groups.
The timing is odd. And we'll still see whether we've got a reshuffle to come. But these are people who are going to go back and they're going to bond with their constituency parties over the summer. And I don't think many of them are going to come back and promise the whips that they're going to stop rebelling.
I asked Brian Leishman, are you going to stop? If the Chief whips say, 'Brian, all you need to do is promise that you'll stop rebelling against this government'?
He said, 'no, I couldn't possibly say that.'
Andrew Marr was speaking earlier on the New Statesman podcast.
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