Oh dear. At the beginning of Covid, Dr Rosena Allin-Khan won plaudits across parliament for returning to do shifts on the NHS frontline. But in recent months the former deputy leader contender has earned herself the wanted reputation of being one of Parliament’s worst offenders for disseminating ‘fake news’ – no mean feat considering some of the contenders she is up against.
In January the self-styled shadow ‘cabinet’ minister for mental health sent a bizarre tweet late one Saturday night that claimed the vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi had managed to fast track the vaccine queue. After first asking people not to pile on the minister over the unsubstantiated rumour that she herself had started, Allin-Khan finally deleted it and apologised.
Then in February, Allin-Khan circulated an image of nurses working in bin bags that contrasted PPE shortages with procurement deals and which attacked the government’s ‘profiteering, cronymism and shameful incompetence.’ The only problem? The image was taken in a Spanish hospital – a fact that prompted the frontbencher to apologise and delete the tweet (again).
Now today in March, Labour’s shadow health minister has managed to get her hat trick. Tweeting a clip of Dominic Cummings discussing his pay before the Science and Technology select committee this morning, she wrote: ‘Here is Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, saying “It is true that I interfered with the pay system, regarding my own pay.” Nurses on the frontline don’t get that luxury, they’ve had a pre-agreed pay rise snatched from them.’
But what the good doctor failed to include in her tweet was that Cummings was discussing how he negotiated a pay CUT to his salary for the first five months in No 10, agreeing to forgo the usual £140,000 salary expected for his position as chief adviser until Brexit had been achieved. Mr S is fairly confident that any nurse who wished to forgo part of their salary could do so but was unable to check with Allin-Khan as she blocked anyone from replying to it until, eventually, she was forced to (you guessed it) delete the tweet (again).
Steerpike wonders if Keir Starmer would do well to take a leaf from the book of a previous leader of the opposition and pass on to colleagues David Cameron’s wise words on the perils of too many tweets.
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