Kendall campaign responds to “Taliban” jibes

Toby Perkins, who is chairing Liz Kendall’s campaign, has written to both Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper concerning anonymous briefings made by one of their campaigns which compared Kendall supporters to the Taliban.

This morning’s Telegraph carried a story which claimed that people working for the Burnham and Cooper campaigns had told the paper that Kendall’s chances were waning. However, it is not known which camp made the comments about “the end of Taliban New Labour” and Kendall’s attempts to reach out to “Blairite Taliban MPs”.

Perkins has written to the two leadership candidates to say that they should be “aware of how inappropriate and offensive” the remarks were and has asked them to commit that they will not be repeated.

He wrote:

“When this election is over, whoever wins will need to bring people together from right across our movement to defeat our real enemy, the Conservative Party. This sort of language makes that task more difficult and only serves to damage us all.”

You can read the full letter below (click to enlarge):