A Labour MP has quit the party less than three months since its landslide election victory.
Rosie Duffield blamed Keir Starmer’s “cruel and unnecessary” policies as well as the freebies row which has engulfed Keir Starmer in recent weeks.
The Canterbury MP announced her shock decision in an interview with the Sunday Times.
Duffield, a former Labour whip who was first elected as an MP in 2017, identified the decision to axe winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners, as well as keeping the two-child benefit cap, as the main reasons for her move.
In her resignation letter to the PM, she said: “Although many ‘last straws’ have led to my decision, my reason for leaving now is the programme of policies you seem determined to stick to, however unpopular they are with the electorate and your own MPs.
“You repeat often that you will make the ‘tough decisions’ and that the country is ‘all in this together’. But those decisions do not directly affect any one of us in parliament.
“They are cruel and unnecessary, and affects hundreds of thousands of our poorest, most vulnerable constituents. This is not what I was elected to do. It is not even wise politics, and it certainly is not ‘the politics of service’.”
Duffield also condemned the “sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice” which has seen the PM, his wife and other senior Labour figures accept clothes, concert tickets and other hospitality from supporters.
“The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale, she said.
“I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party.”
Duffield, who has clashed with Starmer in the past over the issue of trans rights, has grown increasingly critical of the prime minister in recent weeks.
In a direct attack on the PM, she wrote: “As prime minister, your managerial style and technocratic approach, and lack of basic politics and political instincts, have come crashing down on us as a party after we worked so hard, promised so much, and waited a long 14 years to be mandated by the British public to return to power.
“Since the change of government in July, the revelations of hypocrisy have been staggering and increasingly outrageous. I cannot put into words how angry I and my colleagues are at your total lack of understanding about how you have made us all appear.
“How dare you take our longed-for victory, the electorate’s sacred and precious trust, and throw it back in their individual faces and the faces of dedicated and hardworking Labour MPs?”
Duffield added: “The Labour Party was formed to speak for those of us without a voice, and I stood for election partly because I saw decisions about the lives of those like me being made in Westminster by only the most privileged few.
“Right now, I cannot look my constituents in the eye and tell them that anything has changed. I hope to be able to return to the party in the future, when it again resembles the party I love, putting the needs of the many before the greed of the few.”