LABOUR rebel Sarah Champion has “unresigned” and returned to Jeremy Corbyn’s team.
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The email reportedly reads: “I would like to formally retract my resignation and ask to be reinstated to my role as Shadow Home Office minister for preventing abuse and domestic violence with immediate effect”.
Responding to MPs who have warned of death threats from Corbyn supporters, he said anyone guilty of intimidation should be “kicked out of the party”, but hinted that he believed the only people threatening to split Labour were those opposing the current leadership.
A Labour spokesman said: “There’s always work to be done”.
The shadow chancellor was speaking as Jeremy Corbyn faces a leadership challenge from Owen Smith and the leadership became embroiled in a row over a “break-in” at an MP’s Westminster office.
Sarah Champion resigned in June as 172 of Labour’s MPs backed a vote of no confidence in the leader, saying at the time, “I can only do what I feel is right, even though it’s breaking my heart”.
The latest findings further pointed to continued strong support for Corbyn at grassroots levels despite weeks of bitter conflict between the leader and Labour lawmakers at Westminster, a large majority of whom backed a vote of no confidence following the European Union referendum last month.
Mr Smith described Seema Malhotra’s claim as an “internal little spat” but said staffers should not have entered the former shadow minister’s office without her permission.
We have a democracy and we need Labour politics of solidarity to avoid the kind of anger and hostility that the politics of division inspires, ” she said.
More than 183,000 people paid the fee during the 48-hour window for such applications last week.
The MP for Hayes & Harlington said there was a “small group” within the party responsible for the current turmoil which had seen it beset by allegations of bullying, intimidation and abuse.
“Put plainly, there is simply too much of it taking place and it needs to stop”.
“This is a breach of parliamentary privilege and is a violation of the privacy, security and confidentiality of a member of parliament’s office”.
Mr Corbyn’s comments come after 44 women Labour MPs wrote to him in a letter organised by backbencher Paula Sherriff complaining at his “inadequate” response to the abuse.
The Labour History Research Unit at Anglia Ruskin University polled 350 Labour Party councillors across the 250 most marginal parliamentary constituencies in the United Kingdom (the 125 seats Labour won and the 125 Labour lost by the lowest margins in the 2015 election).
Mr Smith, a former history and French student at Sussex University in the 1990s, helped by-election candidate Lloyd Russell-Moyle and his supporters as they went out canvassing.
A survey of Labour councillors in the country’s most marginal constituencies has found overwhelming backing for Pontypridd MP Owen Smith in the leadership race.
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Owen Smith has today written to Jeremy Corbyn asking him to back a plan to hold “at least one” leadership hustings in each United Kingdom region.
