Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has said the number of Labour MPs who did not vote despite a three-line whip shows the Prime Minister is not believed by his own party.
Speaking on GB News, he said: “53 abstentions, 15 voting against a majority of 112: the numbers tell a story of a Prime Minister who is not even believed by his own party.
“Yes, one of those abstentions was Yvette Cooper, because she’s with the King, but most of them will be people who deliberately stayed away.
“And why did they stay away? They stayed away because in the House of Commons earlier in the day, Sir Keir Starmer had lost not only his middle stump, but his leg stump and his off stump, as the bowling that was delivered in the Foreign Affairs Select Committee showed that he had no defence of his wicket whatsoever.
“Not a Boycottian defensive performance, but that you might expect from the worst of number elevens, and he lives in number 10.
“Now, what do we know? We know that the process was not, in fact, followed. We know that because it’s become clear, as the Foreign Office mandarins have come out of the woodwork, that the process was invented as they went along.
“And to say you’re following a process when you’re making it up on the hoof is not straightforward.
“And then this wonderful thing, did the Foreign Office come under pressure? The Prime Minister said it came under no pressure. And if any of you heard Bridget Phillipson on the wireless this morning parsing the word ‘pressure’ to try and pretend that there were various forms of pressure, you would have thought that the use of language was not something that politicians could manage successfully.
“The pressure on the Foreign Office was so enormous and routine that they didn’t even bother getting security clearance for other senior figures in the government, including Mr. Powell, the brother of the more famous and distinguished Lord Powell of Bayswater.
“Jonathan Powell, he didn’t bother getting his clearance whilst he was busy giving away the Chagos islands. No process, no honesty, no integrity, and of course, no Privileges Committee, because they couldn’t dare face that proper constitutional examination of what had gone on, even if last time it didn’t work quite like that.”
