A Labour MP yesterday called for the lobbyist at the centre of allegations about improper contacts with British government Ministers to be expelled from the party, as the lobbyist continued to deny he had done anything wrong.
Further allegations made in the Observer yesterday rendered the position of the lobbyist, Mr Derek Draper, untenable, the Labour MP, Mr Gordon Prentice, claimed. He said that if Mr Draper remained in the party then "thousands of good people will go" and Labour would fail to win a second term in government. "The Labour Party is a broad church but even the broadest church has walls and Draper should be outside. If there's a perception out there that we are as sleazy as the previous lot there won't be a second term for this government," he told BBC Radio 4.
The Observer heaped further embarrassment on the government with its claims that Mr Draper, who resigned from his job with the lobby firm GPC Market Access earlier this week and was sacked from his newspaper column on the Express, received faxes from the Minister without Portfolio, Mr Peter Mandelson, almost every day. The allegation was that the amount of contact between Mr Draper and the government was significant and contrasted with Downing Street's line this week that the former lobbyist was simply a boastful young man "fluttering" around the edge of the government.
However, Mr Draper has claimed the Observer is hounding him and that the faxes were not significant papers amounting to insider information. "I was writing a newspaper column about politics. I would get newspaper cuttings, speeches - innocent sort of public material," he told GMTV. "I dispute the way the Observer has cobbled things together. I regret the things that I've already admitted but I have done nothing wrong or dishonest . . . I have never been given inside information about anything by anyone in the government."
The editor of the Observer, Mr Will Hutton, said the faxes were significant but he conceded that no inside information had been passed to Mr Draper. "What we have established is that even if these were low-level faxes, there was a lot of traffic between Peter Mandelson's office and Derek Draper," he said on the same programme.
The Conservatives repeated their charge that the whole affair was a symptom of "Tony's Cronies" and not simply the mistakes made by one man. The Shadow Defence secretary, Mr John Maples, declared: "The question for people like me is not what he [Derek Draper] has done wrong but what the government has done wrong. What we have been seeing is a systematic group of `Tony's Cronies', of people who have had relationships with the Labour Party, very inside relationships, continuing to maintain these contacts. This goes at the heart of the way the Labour Party operates."
The Association of Professional Political Consultants (APPC), the trade association for lobbyists, is to hold a crisis meeting this week with two of the lobby firms involved in the "cash-for-access" allegations.
GPC Market Access and GJW, which apologised last week for leaking details of a Commons Select Committee report, will meet the Association tomorrow to assure members the scandal will not be repeated. As details emerged in the Sunday Times yesterday that a former permanent secretary to the Treasury is claiming that an aide of the Chancellor, Mr Gordon Brown, leaked details of the Budget to the media, the APPC said it was concerned that "young idiots" had embarrassed the government and Labour would "take it out on our profession."
PA reports: The Tories added two more by-election gains as the Blair government moves into the traditionally troubled mid-term period at Westminster.
A projection based on all eight of Thursday's results suggests a nationwide Labour lead of 3 per cent. This compares with a 4.3 per cent Conservative margin the previous week, but is owed entirely to the split in the Tory vote at Hutton South, Brentwood Borough nearly allowing Liberal Democrats to squeeze through.
It is also in stark contrast to the findings of three opinion polls earlier this month showing Labour leads between 24 per cent and 29 per cent, but their field work was carried out before the "cash-for-access" row got fully underway.
Labour was 13 per cent ahead at last year's general election and projected to be 6 per cent in the lead in the council elections on May 7th. Both the Conservative gains came in the Norfolk South West Commons constituency.