LABOUR leadership candidate Angela Eagle’s diversity guru had links to the notorious Jack the Ripper museum in Cable Street, the Morning Star can reveal today.

This is while Ms Eagle pitches herself as the “working-class woman” candidate during this week’s Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) hustings to garner approval ahead of the leadership election.

The Wallasey MP and rival Owen Smith, MP for Pontypridd, resigned from the shadow cabinet as part of an attempted coup against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Corporate adviser Linda Riley was appointed by the Labour Party in April to aid then-shadow business secretary Ms Eagle and act as a representative to firms on equality-related matters.

She was also pictured standing in the front row in support of her leadership campaign event last week.

But Ms Riley was previously involved in two companies with the founder of the notorious Jack the Ripper museum on Cable Street in London’s East End.

Ms Riley was a director of the now-dissolved firms Jack the Ripper Museum Ltd and Museum of Jack the Ripper Ltd, along with former Google diversity chief Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe.

Those companies shut down in March and August 2014, but Mr Palmer-Edgecumbe went on to open the museum itself in August 2015 under a new company, Jack the Ripper Museum (London) Ltd.

Ms Riley is not involved in that most recent company.

The museum has been accused of “glorifying” serial killings of working-class women in east London and was targeted by protesters as the original plans submitted to Tower Hamlets council suggested it would be a museum of women’s history.

Mr Palmer-Edgecumbe defended his museum, saying it was meant to “seriously examine” the crimes within the social context of the 1880s.

Ms Riley declined to describe her views on the museum.

She said that the two companies with which she was involved were “nothing to do with the Jack the Ripper Cable St museum” and related to a previous project.

“I agreed to act as a consultant on the project years ago when it was the Jack the Ripper Exhibition at the Museum of London,” she said.

Oddly, registration details for the museum’s website — jacktherippermuseum.com — dating to July 2015 contain Ms Riley’s name and an email address for Square Peg Media, which she helped found in 2005.

However, Ms Riley resigned as a director of Square Peg in 2012 and there is nothing to suggest that this is anything other than a mistake and Ms Riley’s lawyers noted that this was “outside of [her] control.”

LSE academic and Class War activist Lisa Mckenzie, who has protested against the museum, told the Morning Star it was “a disgrace” that “self-styled diversity gurus Riley and Palmer-Edgecumbe have constantly ignored the distress this ‘museum’ has caused the local community.”

She added: “The day Angela Eagle announced her friend Linda Riley’s appointment, I was shocked that such a person is constantly being given chances to ride roughshod over people’s concerns. This shows very poor judgement by Eagle.”
Ms Eagle’s parliamentary office did not respond to a request for comment.