Labour MP who threatened to smash reporter’s face with bat made trade envoy by Starmer
Kate Osamor has been named the UK’s representative to East Africa, four years after she was ordered to apologise to the House of Commons
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Your support makes all the difference.A Labour MP who threatened to smash a reporter’s face with a ‘f****** bat’ has been made a trade envoy by Keir Starmer.
Kate Osamor was ordered to apologise for the incident and for using House of Commons headed notepaper for a character reference in her son’s drug case in 2020.
Last year she was also suspended by her party after she said Israeli action in Gaza should be remembered as a genocide, in a post about Holocaust Memorial Day.
She has now been named as the government’s new trade envoy to East Africa, alongside 31 other parliamentarians as part of a massive expansion of the scheme.
The move comes as the chancellor Rachel Reeves tries to court foreign investment and boost UK exports as part of her growth plans.
Also on the list is Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who has previously called for the UK to pay reparations for slavery. She has been named the official trade envoy to Ghana.
Ian Austin, a former adviser to former PM Gordon Brown, has been given the Israel brief, while former Lord Iain McNicol of West Kilbride has been appointed to Jordan, Kuwait and the Palestine Territories. Former shadow minister Rosena Allin-Khan was appointed to the South Africa role.
An investigation into Ms Osamor by the Commons Committee on Standards found the MP for Edmonton had breached the MP’s code of conduct numerous times and ordered her to apologise to the House in a letter.
They included using Commons notepaper for a reference for her son, who in October 2018 was sentenced to a community order in a drugs case.
Later, the former shadow minister told a journalist asking about the reference: “I should have come down here with a f****** bat and smashed your face open.”
Last year she was suspended by Labour over her Gaza genocide comments, made in a message distributed to local party members.
She later apologised for "any offence caused" and had the party whip restored following an inquiry into the comment.
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