In recent months, Derek Hatton has been taking to the airwaves to wax lyrical about Jeremy Corbyn. Although the former deputy leader of Liverpool Council’s request to rejoin the party 29 years after they expelled him was turned down, he remains a supporter of the Corbyn regime.
So, with this year’s party conference in his home city of Liverpool, Hatton was keen to attend the event. What’s more, Mr S understands that the Liverpool Echo decided it would be a good idea to get Hatton to write a conference diary for the paper and so he applied for a press pass.
Alas brains at Labour HQ have deemed Hatton to not be suitable press pass material. ‘The Liverpool Echo asked me to write a conference diary but I was told two weeks ago the application had been declined,’ he tells Mr S. Although Hatton remains expelled, he is disappointed by the decision given that he just wanted to cover the event as a journalist. ‘It wasn’t even for a political journal – it was for the Liverpool Echo,’ he says. ‘It’s not surprising though with the way the party are excluding people at the moment.’
While Hatton has vowed to write a diary for the paper nonetheless, perhaps it’s for the best he doesn’t get too close to the main stage. At the 1985 conference in Bournemouth, Neil Kinnock used his speech to condemn Hatton’s Labour council for wreaking ‘grotesque chaos’ in Liverpool by ‘hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers’. With reports surfacing today that figures linked to Militant in the 1980s are involved in a Momentum group in Liverpool, party bods can at least take heart that one of Militant’s more notorious members of old is not making inroads.
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