Ovenden said he had already been planning to resign but had brought it forward to avoid further distractions to Starmer\u2019s leadership.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am accused of eight years ago as a junior press officer sharing with a female colleague the details of a silly conversation that I was party to with other female staff members,\u201d he said in a statement to ITV News.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore summer, I had announced to some of my colleagues my intention to leave government \u2026 I\u2019ve brought forward my resignation to avoid distracting from the vital work this government is doing to positively change people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Starmer is already facing intense scrutiny after revelations concerning the friendship<\/a> between Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein led to the sacking of the former.<\/p>\n He also had to accept the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister<\/a> Angela Rayner two weeks ago, when she was found to have underpaid \u00a340,000 in property tax on her home in Brighton. Her departure forced Starmer to reshuffle his Cabinet<\/a>.<\/p>\n A No. 10 spokesperson said: \u201cThis story involves a former staff member and eight-year-old messages that pre-date employment in government. We don\u2019t comment on staff.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ovenden said he had already been planning to resign but had brought it forward to avoid further distractions…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3003,64839,59,57,58,420,50,424,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-139202","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-angela-rayner","9":"tag-diane-abbott","10":"tag-gb","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-greatbritain","13":"tag-keir-starmer","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-peter-mandelson","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}