How did Jared O’Mara end up in Parliament, and will he remain there for much longer? Today he was suspended from the Labour whip, and an investigation was launched into the allegations about his online posts and conversations, including an allegation that he used misogynistic and transphobic language to a constituent this year. The suspension happened just before Prime Minister’s Questions, and after the session, Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman said the party had acted today because the latest claims, which O’Mara disputes, related to more recent behaviour.
The curious thing is that while some of O’Mara’s colleagues say they had known about the allegations for weeks – as well as the fact that journalists had been working on the story for some time too – the official line from Jeremy Corbyn’s office is that the national Labour Party only heard them this week. Corbyn’s spokesman said that ‘as far as I’m aware, there was no knowledge at the party headquarters about this material until this week’. Asked why no-one had passed the allegations on, the spokesman said Labour had the best procedures out of any party on dealing with these kinds of situations ‘as far as I’m aware, nothing about Jared O’Mara came until Monday’.
There is also the question of how on earth O’Mara was selected when a bit of googling might have suggested he wasn’t a straightforward candidate. The snap election and the way the national party overruled local parties in order to get campaigning going as soon as possible are factors, but googling doesn’t take much time. A row that involves an MP being suspended from the whip and a formal investigation takes rather longer.
As so often with scandals like this, the focus is turning from the initial allegations to a question of process. When did the party know about it and what they did about it is a key question, as if nothing was done until the allegations emerged in the press, then the party’s structures still aren’t working. We saw this in the Lord Rennard case, in which those alleging inappropriate behaviour and assault eventually turned to the media when they realised that the party wasn’t going to help. The problem for a party comes when it turns out that it did know after all.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that the Labour Party Headquarters is not the same as the Labour WhipsWhips in all parties stockpile information on all their MPs, often actively seeking it out. Often this information is held without ever being used – but it is often used as a threat against MPs who are considering rebelling. When a vote becomes about principle versus your wife being told about your Westminster secret, then your decision-making process changes rather.
The whips (and not just the Labour ones) will certainly hold information about other MPs who are alleged to have behaved inappropriately. And Guido has been reporting allegations about the MP for months. Now that John Mann is threatening to expose a colleague who was sent home from a foreign delegation for inappropriate behaviour, the whips may well be scouring through their black books once again.
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