Conor McGinn suspended from Labour under new rules. Will it be poetic justice?
Suspended: Conor McGinn.
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An MP who was believed to have co-ordinated a series of resignations from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet in 2016, in an effort to undermine the then-Labour leader, is now facing disciplinary proceedings under new rules.
The new procedures were brought in by current leader Keir Starmer to make Labour seem more responsive to complaints, after the party was criticised for apparently being unresponsive to allegations of anti-Semitism during Mr Corbyn’s time as leader.
It is ironic, because any lack of response had been shown to be due to foot-dragging by right-wing factionalists at Labour’s head office who were trying to drag Mr Corbyn down. Now the procedures their actions hustled in may bring down a right-wing factionalist.
McGinn himself was said to have “choreographed” the flurry of resignations in the summer of 2016, according to Sophy Ridge of Sky News.
It was significant because at that time he was one of Mr Corbyn’s Whips – tasked with ensuring party discipline.
Some might say he had been an unsafe choice for Mr Corbyn because he was part of a network of Blairite Labour politicians who had opposed Corbyn’s leadership of the party from the beginning.
Despite his role in the so-called ‘Chicken Coup’, McGinn did not resign for another four months, finally leaving his Corbyn-appointed role in October 2016, after a couple more very odd incidents, as described by This Site at the time:
This is the man who, in an article on PoliticsHome titled I can no longer tolerate Jeremy Corbyn’s hypocrisy, claimed fellow whips had told him the Labour leader had threatened to telephone his father, a former Sinn Fein councillor, over comments made by Mr McGinn (Jr) in an interview.
It very quickly transpired that none of his allegations are substantiated by factual evidence. There is no record of the content of the call he allegedly received from the Whips’ Office and he does not say how “it transpired” that Mr Corbyn was going to phone his dad.
Shortly afterwards, Mr McGinn was embroiled in a row with his own Constituency Labour Party members, after a group of women was excluded from a meeting to discuss a vote of confidence in Mr Corbyn.
It would appear that this group of members had been fed incorrect information about the venue for a CLP meeting; that McGinn and local councillors/delegates had conducted the meeting behind locked doors, and when questioned shrugged off members’ genuine concerns.
But in his report to the police – yes, the police – about the incident, and in a subsequent article on PoliticsHome, it seems Mr McGinn claimed that a group of thugs had ransacked his office and threatened him so severely that he required police protection.
What? I mean, that last claim was bizarre in the extreme.
Details of the allegation against McGinn have not been provided.
As he has lost the Labour whip, he will sit as an Independent MP – although one doubts that he will choose to seat himself next to fellow Independent and former Labour MP… Jeremy Corbyn.
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