I worked alongside Rebecca Long-Bailey in Labour’s shadow Treasury team for nine months, until publicly I resigned at the end of an afternoon session of the finance bill committee on the afternoon of Thursday, June 30, 2016.
My resignation is duly recorded in the Hansard record of proceedings in parliament.
I have seen a video excerpt of her recent speech at Ronnie Campbell’s retirement dinner. She referred at some length to what supposedly happened when I resigned.
Her account of what happened is very inaccurate. It is self-serving, and demonstrably not true. Had she bothered to check, the truth is clearly shown in Hansard. Does this careless aspirant leader not do any basic research?
Contrary to what Ms Long-Bailey says, the chair of the committee did not end that session early, to assist Ms Long-Bailey. As is common, the party whips had in advance agreed the point at which the session would end. Because the committee had reached that agreed point (clause 49 – not clause 20 as she claims), the session was about to end when I resigned. The session duly ended, at 3.24pm. After all, on a Thursday afternoon no MP wants to stay too long. They want to get back home to their respective constituencies.
Despite what she claims, Ms Long-Bailey did not have to work through that Thursday night to be ready for the next session of the committee at 9am the next day, Friday, July 1. There was no such session.
As Hansard shows, I resigned at the end of the afternoon session Thursday, June 30, 2016 – not the morning session as she claims. The next session of that committee was – as timetabled weeks before – held almost five days later, on Tuesday morning, July 5. I had deliberately timed my resignation to give the remaining members of the shadow Treasury team ample time in which to prepare for the next session. Again, she has not done the basics to check the accuracy of her faulty memory.
She implies that I removed all of the shadow Treasury team’s finance bill research from a shared drive. I did not. The only material removed was the research done by me and my assistant. Since I was no longer a shadow minister, I had no need of the material, and removed it from the shared Parliamentary drive.
All of the removed material belonged to me. None of it was paid for by the Labour Party. It was funded solely by my own parliamentary expenses; an entirely proper use of such monies. Thus all that material was mine alone, not the Labour Party’s.
Even though I had kept my removed material, neither Ms Long-Bailey nor anyone else ever bothered to ask me for a copy of that material, either on the day I resigned or later. If, to do the research, Ms Long-Bailey had to work as hard as she claims, it was her own choice not to ask.
Ms Long-Bailey is not telling the truth about me, no doubt inadvertently. She ought to apologise forthwith. It is worrying that her memory is once again so faulty, and this raises doubts about her suitability to be Labour leader, let alone prime minister.
Rob Marris was the MP for Wolverhampton South West.