A Labour shadow cabinet member has attacked leader Sir Keir Starmer for writing an op-ed column for The Sun newspaper.
Shadow housing minister Mike Amesbury tweeted his disapproval of the opposition leader penning the piece for the paper which admitted publishing false claims about the behaviour of Liverpool FC fans during the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster that killed 97 people, calling it "wrong and insensitive".
"Justice for the 97 is not done, the hurt for Hillsborough families and supporters is raw", Amesbury wrote. "Vile untruths were peddled to protect the establishment & those responsible escape justice".
Amesbury's Weaver Vale constituency lies around 20 miles from Liverpool, where The Sun is still widely boycotted by readers and newsagents alike for the front-page claim that Liverpool supporters picked the pockets of the dead and urinated on their corpses in the aftermath of the deadly crush at the away game to Sheffield Wednesday.
The Labour leader sounded a pessimistic not in his article, claiming Christmas would be "spoiled" by Prime Minister Boris Johnson's "incompetence" over the shortage of Heavy Goods Vehicle drivers, a Europe-wide problem.
"The shortage of HGV drivers should not have been a surprise to the government", Starmer claimed. "I spoke to industry bosses this week who said they had been warning ministers for months. Boris Johnson knew this was coming. He had been warned".
But on Sunday former Conservative Party leader and work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith revealed that the government had been raising the issue with haulage firms since 2012. He said employers had refused to pay to train new drivers as they preferred to recruit them from eastern Europe while the UK was in the European Union (EU).
The Road Haulage Association (RHA) raised the spectre of food an fuel shortages over the summer and autumn, demanding the government issue 100,000 visas for lorry drivers from the EU — where there is a shortage of 400,000 — in the face of rising wages.
On Friday, Industry Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng blamed the recent spate of fuel panic-buying that has seen some petrol stations run dry on greedy bosses trying to depress wages to pre-Brexit levels.