Jeremy Corbyn’s office has been forced to deny that a staff member offered supportive advice to the activist Marc Wadsworth the day before a disciplinary hearing at which he was expelled for bringing Labour into disrepute.
Wadsworth was initially suspended after a confrontation with the Jewish MP Ruth Smeeth at an event launching the party’s inquiry into antisemitism.
Wadsworth said he would challenge Friday’s expulsion decision in court and claimed Corbyn’s office had been in touch with him on the first day of his hearing before the national constitutional committee (NCC).
Wadsworth said he and the Labour leader were “old friends and comrades” for many years. “When they called me on the first day of the hearing, they said to me that they had been working behind the scenes, that what I said wasn’t antisemitic,” he told a press conference.
Labour sources were adamant that the call had not been to offer support, but confirmed that a staff member had spoken to Wadsworth to contain any possible disruption of the hearing. The source claimed that during the call, Wadsworth expressed unhappiness at a lack of support from Corbyn.
“No member of staff called to offer Marc Wadsworth support,” a party source said. “Wadsworth did not claim support from Jeremy during his NCC hearing.”
The conclusion of the case comes 22 months after the first complaint was made against the activist. Wadsworth challenged Smeeth at the launch of Shami Chakrabarti’s inquiry into antisemitism in 2016, accusing her of working “hand in hand” with a Telegraph journalist.
Smeeth has said she was reduced to tears by his remarks. Wadsworth, who was distributing flyers at the event, has said he did not know Smeeth was Jewish.
Speaking to journalists after his expulsion was confirmed, Wadsworth claimed Corbyn “told mutual friends he wasn’t embarrassed because he doesn’t see that I did anything wrong”.
Asked if Corbyn had been in touch during the disciplinary process, Wadsworth said: “I have been in touch with his office and been in touch with the leadership, yes.
“You’ll see at the launch of the Chakrabarti report, we are chatting as old friends and comrades, I knew Jeremy before he was elected to parliament, when he was a trade union official and he was talking to me about a text that he’d sent me.”
Wadsworth said Corbyn’s alleged support was not unqualified. “You have to interpose that with the fact that Jeremy did have a bit of a go at me at the launch of the Chakrabarti report and said that perhaps I could have used kinder language,” he said.
Wadsworth declined to name who had been in touch with him: “I’m not going to get into names.” He suggested the phone call had been a pastoral one. “I’ve known Jeremy for 40 years. If I’m about to go into a hearing that could change the course of my life, and we’ve done politics together that long, don’t you think they’d sort of want to know … ‘How are you?’” he said.
A Labour party spokesperson said: “The NCC has found that two charges of a breach of the Labour party’s rule 2.1.8 by Marc Wadsworth have been proven. The NCC consequently determined that the sanction for this breach of Labour party rules will be expulsion from membership.”
Jonathan Arkush, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who met the Labour leader this week to express community concerns about antisemitism, said it was the right result and was a step in the right direction.
The Jewish Labour Movement also welcomed the decision but said the delay had been unacceptable. “This case, dating back to the very day of the Chakrabarti inquiry launch, is symptomatic of the ongoing delays in resolving disciplinary matters. We now need to see sustained action by the party and leadership, including on Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker.”
Labour Against the Witch-hunt, a campaign group set up to protest against expulsions, supported Wadsworth at the hearing in Westminster. Dozens of MPs, organised by the Labour backbencher Wes Streeting, marched with Smeeth from parliament to the hearing.
During the hearing on Wednesday, where Smeeth gave evidence and was cross-examined by Wadsworth’s legal representative, two Labour MPs, Chris Williamson and Clive Lewis, gave character references for Wadsworth.
He was charged with bringing the party into disrepute, rather than antisemitism, which was not a specific offence in the Labour rulebook at the time of the incident.
The party has said it aims to deal with several other key cases involving antisemitism, including the former mayor of London Livingstone, and Walker, the former vice-chair of Momentum, within three months.
On Friday, Livingstone said he had been campaigning for Labour in the local elections despite his suspension from the party. He told LBC that the antisemitism row was “a complete diversion … We had this last year in the run-up to the local elections then. We had it two years ago in the run-up to the election of Sadiq Khan [as London mayor].”