Andrew Gwynne, until today the junior health minister of the United Kingdom, deeply regrets his badly misjudged comments.
"I deeply regret my badly misjudged commments and apologise for any offense I've caused. I've served the Labour Party all my life and it was a huge honour to be appointed a minister by Keir Starmer," he wrote on social media. "I entirely understand the decisions the PM and the party have taken and, while very sad to have been suspended, will support them in any way I can."
Gwynne "said he hoped a 72-year-old woman would soon be dead, after she wrote to a local councillor about bin collections," the BBC reported, citing an exposé in the Mail on Sunday.
After the councillor shared the letter among fellow Labour figures in the WhatsApp group, Mr Gwynne wrote a suggested response: 'Dear resident, F*** your bins. I'm re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you'll have croaked it by the all-outs.'
He also made various racist and antisemitic jokes in an online venue that was not as private as he thought it was, including suggesting that someone named "Marshall Rosenberg" sounded too military and too Jewish, and "Geoffrey the Giraffe says don't be nasty to the Jews," presumably in reference to the once-famed Toys 'r Us mascot.
On someone who had asked for more bike lanes, he wrote: "I had positive visions of him getting mown down by an Elsa Waste HGV while he's cycling to the Fallowfield Loop. We couldn't be that lucky!'
A trifecta of insulting remarks about now-former colleagues in the Labour Party—a racist one about party veteran Diane Abbott, a sexist one about deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, and a homophobic one about a "Colin Cumface"— helped him out the door.
