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The brutally swift downfall of the health minister Andrew Gwynne and his Labour colleague Oliver Ryan was a story few in Westminster saw coming.
Gwynne, 50, had managed to dodge most controversies during his near 20-year stint in parliament, though rose to brief fame for calling Boris Johnson a “pillock” on live television in 2017.
The real political danger, it seems, came not from Westminster but from his constituency 200 miles away on the edge of Manchester, where long-simmering Labour party divisions have now burst into the open.
The WhatsApp group where Labour figures posted racist, sexist and homophobic comments was centred on Gwynne’s power base in the town of Denton in Tameside, where he was elected as a local councillor almost 30 years ago at the age of 21.
Labour insiders said the local party’s “toxic” fallouts were well known in the region. They were not surprised that Gwynne’s inner circle was the subject of the highly damaging leaks, which first emerged in the Mail on Sunday.
“You would turn up at an event and they would be slagging off the other side,” said one senior Labour figure in Greater Manchester. “Any time we were in a party setting with Andrew Gwynne and some of those people, they would just be slagging off the people they didn’t like.
“You get a bit of that in politics but they were probably the worst at it in terms of the Greater Manchester scene.”
The Guardian has seen more than 1,000 pages of WhatsApp messages, spanning 2019 to 2022, in which the sacked minister joked about the death of an elderly voter and a cycling campaigner, who he hoped would be “mown down” by a lorry.
He also said someone “sounds too Jewish” and “too militaristic”, apparently from their name alone.
In newly disclosed messages, Gwynne described a constituent as “an illiterate retard” and a fellow councillor as a “fat middle aged useless thicket”. He called neighbouring MP Nav Mishra, a “splitter” for forming a group of leftwing Labour MPs in 2022.
The group, named Trigger Me Timbers, was set up by Gwynne’s office caseworker Claire Reid in January 2019. At its height it had 44 members, most of whom were local councillors and activists.
The forum was initially set up to discuss routine party business, such as local events and campaign literature. But it soon turned “nasty”, according to one Labour figure.
The group’s ire was reserved for leftwing Labour activists, whom they refer to more than 100 times as “trots”.
When Christian Wakeford defected from the Conservatives to Labour in January 2022, Ryan – then a local councillor – joked about “all the trots exploding on socials”.
Gwynne said “the nutty wing” of a local party “is going bonkers that we’ve let a Tory have the Labour whip and not Jezza” – a reference to Jeremy Corbyn, who was suspended by the party.
Reid, now a senior official on Labour’s national policy forum, said of the party’s leftwing membership: “Aside from anything else today it’s very good for the internal Party! Hopefully they’ll all leave”, to which Gwynne replied: “Yep.”
While Gwynne and Ryan are the most high profile to be suspended by Labour, Reid and two other senior councillors – George Newton and Jack Naylor – have stepped down from their cabinet positions on Tameside council amid an investigation by party HQ.
Gwynne’s wife, Allison Gwynne, who posted in the group about local children who have “always enjoyed swimming in street rubbish/raw sewage”, is understood to remain in her role as chair of the council’s overview panel – a position she is believed to have been awarded by Labour HQ.
Gerald Cooney, who was ousted as Labour leader of Tameside council last October, said he had told senior party officials multiple times about the “vile” WhatsApp group.
A Labour source did not deny that Cooney had alerted senior party officials to the group but said there had been no formal complaint.
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But it is certainly true that Labour knew about the drama in Tameside. The party’s headquarters said last October that it was sending a team to the region to oversee a culture change due to what it called “unacceptable working practices”.
Eleanor Wills was installed as the leader of the party following a spate of resignations, including chief executive Sandra Stewart, on the back of a withering report into its children’s services department. Local Tories accused Labour of fighting “like rats in a sack” while presiding over failing services.
In Denton, in the heart of Gwynne’s constituency, the MP’s comments have not gone down well with the electorate.
“I voted for Labour,” Beryl Ashton, 78, said, but she said she would not vote for the MP again.
“Become a senior citizen as well, it’s even worse,” she said.
“It’s atrocious, absolutely atrocious,” said another woman who did not want to be named. “It’s a let down.” She added that she thought Gwynne should “absolutely” step down.
“I don’t understand it because if you’re an MP you’re meant to be intelligent,” said John Dargan, 80, “and he’s made unintelligent, stupid remarks, knowing somebody else was going to see it. I know better than that.”
On Gwynne’s comments about the pensioner who complained about bin collections, Dargan said: “I wouldn’t say that about anybody, I wouldn’t say that about my worst enemy.”
“All his constituents are going to think he’s a knobhead,” he added.
Another woman doesn’t want to stop and chat, but shouts “it’s not good is it?” as she walks off.
And a man who gave his name only as Simon said: “He doesn’t seem to have a very high opinion of his constituents.”
“Definitely he should resign,” he said, “and his mate Oliver, and his wife, the whole of them, the councillors, anyone involved in that.
“In fact, the whole council needs looking at root and branch.”
