Latest editorial
SO FORMER foreign secretaries Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind have been judged not to have breached parliamentary standards.
The sting organised by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Telegraph involved a fictitious company sounding out the pair’s willingness to take cash in return for access to powerful figures who could bend or change regulations to the company’s benefit.
Since the company never existed and the favours requested were never carried out, Commissioner for Standards Kathryn Hudson is clearly correct in stating that no rules were broken — “since at no point was either member explicitly asked to lobby and at no point did they offer to do so.”
Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
As the PM and his chief of staff’s blunders have mounted up, ANDREW MURRAY wonders who among Labour’s diminished ‘soft left’ might make a bid for the leadership
Green Party MPs stand alone in Parliament in defending Palestine Action against Labour’s proscription of the group as a terrorist organisation — an outrageous move that the Tories supported and the cowardly Lib Dems abstained on, writes ELLIOT TONG
