Keir Starmer has accused Boris Johnson of taking money intended for schools, hospitals and high streets to cover up Tory corruption.
It comes after reports, which Number 10 refused to deny, that Tory whips had threatened MPs with reduced funding for their local areas unless they voted for the PM’s plan to get Owen Paterson off the hook for breaking Commons standards rules.
According to the Financial Times, some MPs were told “they would lose funding for their constituency” if they failed to toe the line.
Responding to the claim, the Labour leader tweeted: “So Boris Johnson was willing to take money from your schools, your hospitals and your high streets to cover up Tory corruption.”
The Tories have long faced accusations of using ‘levelling up’ cash to hand out rewards to their own MPs, or to target swing seats in elections.
In March, the Mirror revealed 40 of the 45 towns handed £1bn in Towns fund’ cash had at least one Tory MP.
And around half of the towns are in so-called “red wall” northern seats taken from Labour in the 2019 election - and which Boris Johnson is desperate to keep hold of.
A National Audit Office report released in July 2020 revealed 61 of the 101 towns in a previous list of levelling up beneficiaries were chosen by ministers led by Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick - and all but one of these were either Tory-held seats or targets.
At the time, Meg Hillier, chair of the powerful Commons Public Accounts Committee, accused the Government of "cherry-picking" which areas received funds.
Asked yesterday if government funding could be taken away from MPs for refusing to back Boris Johnson's plans, the PM's spokesman refused to answer.
He said: "You’ll appreciate that questions around whipping aren’t ones for me, more broadly I’d say there’s a lot of speculation and reporting around today which I’m just not going to get into."
This morning, Tory former Prime Minister Sir John Major made an extraordinary intervention in the sleaze row, accusing Boris Johnson’s administration of “political corruption.”
The Prime Minister was forced to U-turn over a plan to prevent Mr Paterson facing a 30-day Commons suspension for a serious breach of lobbying rules.
Mr Paterson subsequently quit as an MP after the Government abandoned an attempt to set up a Tory-dominated committee to re-examine his case and the wider Commons standards regime.
Sir John said: "I think the way the Government handled that was shameful, wrong and unworthy of this or indeed any government. It also had the effect of trashing the reputation of Parliament."
Sir John, whose own government in the 1990s was undermined by sleaze rows, said: "When that happened I set up the Nolan Committee on Standards in Public Life to stop it, which has been a huge success.
"The striking difference is this: in the 1990s I set up a committee to tackle this sort of behaviour.
"Over the last few days we have seen today's government trying to defend this sort of behaviour.
"Sleaze is unacceptable, was unacceptable when I was there, and I suffered a great deal of pain and anguish over it.
"It's unacceptable today, and it needs to be stopped."
He suggested there was an arrogance at the heart of Mr Johnson's administration.
"There is a general whiff of 'we are the masters now' about their behaviour."
He added: "Whenever they run up against difficulties with anybody - whether it is the Supreme Court, the Electoral Commission, the BBC, they react not with an understanding, not with trying to placate what has gone wrong, but actually in rather a hostile fashion."
