Westminster is gossiping furiously following the leak of messages written by senior Labour adviser Paul Ovenden in 2017. Ovenden has now resigned from his position after texts containing sexually explicit comments about MP Diane Abbott were made public. But the incident has provoked a wider debate: should somebody really lose their job over private messages sent eight years ago?

Former Jeremy Corbyn spokesman Matt Zarb-Cousin has since claimed that the broadcast media, including the BBC, knew about the existence of the texts “before the election”. This raises questions about whether they have now been released to coincide with the crisis which has enveloped Keir Starmer’s government following the resignation of Angela Rayner and sacking of Peter Mandelson.

That a junior press officer — as Ovenden then was — with Blairite tendencies was exchanging offensive messages about a Corbynite MP is hardly surprising in the context of the factional wars typical of Labour HQ. The lewd nature of the texts might be jarring, but they were intended for a group of close colleagues, including women. My days working in Westminster were often enlivened by light-hearted games of “shag, marry, avoid” (Michael Gove, Ed Miliband, and Nigel Farage, if you were wondering). What’s more, Ovenden’s was a private conversation, with no impact on Labour policy, which should never have seen the light of day.

Zarb-Cousin has also pointed out that “the ultimate irony here is the person whose job it was to do attack and rebuttal is finished off by an attack story,” adding: “the game is the game indeed, and if anything the Labour Right made the rules.” Yet to respond to this story with a shrug is to miss its implications for British political life. Unless we want anyone who has grown up with an internet footprint — barring clinical psychopaths — to be scared off entering politics, we have to eventually reassess our practice of holding private communications to the same standards as public ones.

There are similarities between the treatment of Ovenden and suspended Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, who had the whip removed earlier this year for private WhatsApp messages in which he joked about responding to a constituency request: “Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you’ll have croaked it by the all-outs.”

Is this unpleasant? Sure, and the same could be said of Ovenden’s lurid texts about Abbott. Yet penalizing political figures for what they say on WhatsApp quickly becomes a race to the bottom. Nobody wins from the sharing of gratuitous details, and all the internal warfare achieves is to tarnish the reputation of the party and the political class as a whole. Had the messages remained private, Ovenden’s would have been an entirely victimless offense. Instead, Abbott now faces the embarrassment of reading sexually explicit comments made about her.

A senior staffer from party HQ, who was working for Labour at the time covered by the message leaks, and whose own messages are somewhere in the vast trove leaked to the press, told me he had colleagues contemplating suicide over fear of exposure. He himself does not belong to any faction, but is tired of having this invisible threat looming over him.

Whenever private messages like these are released, there is an outcry from the public about the low moral standards of the people making important decisions for our country. Yet most civilians never see their most tasteless comments exposed to the public — and that’s a good thing. For better or worse, political life includes a blurring of the professional and the personal; colleagues turn into friends out of necessity. The gravest betrayal of our political code of conduct is not laddish humor, no matter how crude, but the realization that there is nothing sacred and no one can be trusted. Our political culture deserves better than public servants and their employees living in constant fear of their banter being taken out of context.

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Stella Tsantekidou is Head of Policy and Campaigns at Catch22. Her Substack is The Human Carbohydrate.

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