It seems the SKWAWKBOX was again a topic of discussion at the latest meeting of Labour’s NEC (National Executive Committee).
Senior sources have told the SKWAWKBOX that NEC member Ann Black spoke to tell the meeting how outrageous it was for this blog to report that, on General Election night, over-eager HQ staffers cancelled the ‘Southside’ access passes of Jeremy Corbyn and his team in anticipation of a coup planned on the assumption that Labour would perform as badly as Labour and media doom-mongers had wrongly predicted.
Said staffers ended up looking extremely foolish as Labour surged both in vote share and in its number of MPs – team members including Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and MP Jon Trickett arrived at Southside just after midnight, with exit poll predictions of the Labour surge and hung Parliament already becoming reality, to find they were unable to get into the building.
In an elegant payback, the team simply turned on its heels, returned to Westminster – and HQ staff have been forced to walk the half-mile along Victoria Street to Westminster when they need to meet Corbyn and his team.
All this was not only apparently outrageous, but was, according to the SKWAWKBOX’s sources, denied by the party’s General Secretary Iain McNicol. In a move that was outrageous, he told the assembled NEC that those locked out had been temporary contract staff taken on for the election, whose access was rescinded because their contracts had ended.
This was, of course, a cause of considerable astonishment among those NEC members who knew exactly what had happened, including at least one who was among the group that found itself locked out.
Moreover, Mr McNicol’s version of events does not explain why the party leader’s team’s email accounts were also cancelled.
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