When Angela Eagle, Shadow First Secretary of State and Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, and Skills handed in her resignation letter to Jeremy Corbyn, she made her misgivings with his leadership clear.
In particular, she cited his performance in the Remain campaign as a reason why she had lost faith in him. Unfortunately for Eagle, just two weeks ago, she was singing a very different tune.
https://twitter.com/marxroadrunner/status/748132183580119040
Speaking to The Guardian, and quoted in their EU referendum live blog at 16:41 on 13 June, Eagle said of Corbyn:
Jeremy is up and down the country, pursuing an itinerary that would make a 25-year-old tired, he has not stopped.
Eagle describes the Labour leader as working hard – tirelessly, even. However, fast-forward to her resignation on 27 June, and she tells a different story.
I was devastated by the result of the EU referendum. Too many of our supporters were taken in by right-wing arguments and I believe this happened, in part, because under your leadership the case to remain in the EU was made with half-hearted ambivalence rather than full-throated clarity.
In her interview with The Guardian, Eagle had no issue recognising the ways that David Cameron and other Conservative Remainers hampered the campaign by making discussions inevitably focus on what Eagle calls “blue on blue psychodrama”, in reference to the split amongst Tories on Brexit.
But such acknowledgement of the difficulties faced by the Remain campaign is missing from her resignation letter, and the words of many of the other MPs who have come out against Corbyn. When considering reports alleging that the coup was planned months in advance, this begins to appear more than a little convenient.
If Eagle does have designs on the party leadership, she may want to avoid publicly contradicting herself in future.
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Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.
