A former Hove MP has been suspended by the Labour Party after serious allegations were made about him.
Ivor Caplin, who was a defence minister under Tony Blair, has removed all mention of Labour from his Twitter profile this week.
In recent weeks, Mr Caplin has been tweeting increasingly explicit images of young men, ranging from semi-naked stills to pornographic videos.
Brighton and Hove News understands the suspension relates to separate allegations. Mr Caplin declined to comment.
The suspension comes less than two weeks after former Brighton Kemptown MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle was suspended, just as he was preparing to campaign for next month’s general election.
The former MPs come from different sides of the party, Mr Caplin from the centrist wing and Mr Russell-Moyle from the left.
Mr Caplin, who was a member of Labour South East’s regional executive committee, helped assemble a panel to oversee Brighton and Hove’s selections for the 2023 local election, which are usually done locally.
He said this was to avoid a repeat of 2019, when several candidates selected after appearing on a slate organised by the local Momentum branch were subsequently suspended or expelled for anti-Semitism.
After two of the candidates selected in 2023 were expelled over allegations one of them did not live in Brighton, Mr Russell-Moyle criticised the lack of local involvement.
Mr Caplin was elected to Hove Borough Council in 1991, and become leader until 1997, when it merged with Brighton. He was elected to the new Brighton and Hove Council in 1996 and was deputy leader until resigning from the council in March 1998, less than a year after being elected to parliament as MP for Hove.
He went from being a whip to defence minister in June 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, until he quit in 2005, when he also unexpectedly stood down as MP.
He then became a lobbyist but remained a prominent figure in Labour politics.
As well as being a senior figure in Labour South East, he was chair of the Jewish Labour Movement in 2018-19 when he was outspoken about anti-Semitism in the party and, until very recently, was a patron of Labour LGBT+.
This local Labour party are a particularly nasty bunch of folks.
Where as the tories are all sunshine and rainbows?
So you’re sure the allegations came from a local party member?
Given he’s not a candidate in any shape or form it’s not connected to the general election.
From first hand experience I can only agree…utterly abusive and corrupt
What happened, did someone not agree with your point of view lol, or did they steal your milk money. Dumb comment with zero context, thanks for the input…
I assume you have now seen his arrest to “protect a vulnerable person, namely a child”…
Would you be attempting to defend this allegedly morally corrupt individual, who allegedly tried to meet a minor for his own sexual gratification?
More Labour “imports” on the horizon ??
How can there be an ‘import’ when nominations closed last week and Peter Kyle is the Labour Candidate in the Hove & Portslade constituency?
“He became defence secretary in June 2003”
No he didn’t. He was a junior minister not the Secretary of State
The Hammer of Hadfield has Struck! Be sure to look behind your bins this evening, social democrats!
Blimey! Christmas time Panto has come early this year!! Seriously though, this looks like a gift to the other parties: Labour spin doctors will now have to work very hard etc.
You couldn’t make this up could you?
What he doesn’t know about carpet , isn’t worth knowing.
Mr Caplin is not from the ‘centrist wing’ of Labour. He is from the right wing.
And you must be from the far left in that case lol as labour is a left wing party… Let me guess, you voted for Corbyn the clown
Andy Burnham actually
Well this all rather sounds like a revenge event for whatever happened to Lloyd. No doubt we will not find out until after the election!
So, finally, Greg Hadfield / Momentum gets their revenge.
All true to form and the past. Labour rips itself apart. Forget about your egos folks and ‘so correct ‘ opinions think of what needs doing for your country and vote Labour.
I have no idea what the allegations against Mr Caplin are, and he’s always come across as a decent man, with community issues at heart. Only time will tell if he’s actually done anything wrong.
But it’s worth pointing out here that Ivor Caplin’s X or Twitter account has clearly been hacked, with those dodgy pictures of naked men only appearing in the last ten days – or since the election was announced.
This is clearly some sort of revenge attack, or politically motivated, and I guess we can expect to see more of this ugliness in the run up to election day.
It’s despicable that these modern attempts at smears are now disrupting the democratic process, and affecting our belief about what is true and what is not.
See comments sections of local newspapers and community groups. Full of these trolls saying stuff like “From first hand experience I can only agree…utterly abusive and corrupt” without context or evidence. Is a tactic… No sane person could look at the two parties and pick labour to ascribe those qualities to… Literally only a very stupid person or a liar. People who see no value in truth fit right into the conservatives party ay…
Greg Hadfield has been posting things about his Twitter content since at least January, so it doesn’t look like his account has been hacked as it would have been addressed before now if that were the case. Possible that Ivor is unwell, or something else is going on.
Sadly it does look like the local Labour Party is in turmoil and very divided. Irrespective of who has done what and what any allegations are, I agree on your point that the whole thing is pretty ugly.
Struggling to see why Lloyd Russell Moyle is even relevant to this item. He was deselected on the grounds of an unproven allegation made 8 years ago. Clearly, the real reason is because he’s a popular and effective left winger! Mr Caplin’s case has no bearing on this, he’s not even a candidate, but perhaps homophobia us prompting B&H News to smear both men by association. Poor journalism.
How is this article or the one about LRM being suspended in any way homophobic?
FYI…LRM is inadvertently homophobic….trans conversion therapy bill.
I have great respect for B+H news.
Bertie, that is a good question.
The issue is multi-layered here and, as a news story, the drama is because there are new allegations against a former Hove MP and local council leader.
The bit I find difficult is how quickly the news reports and the comments here start slagging off an elderly man who has done so much for this city – for example, in helping the local football team when the Seagulls lost the Goldstone ground, and in pushing for the Amex stadium which we now have, which eventually brought Brighton and Hove Albion into the Premier League.
Ivor Caplin is also being found guilty, before any hearing has occurred, and so we should surely leave any allegations there. (I should probably add, that I have never met the man, and so have no other personal view.)
But it feels to me that any story right now that involves the Labour Party is getting undue attention, when similar events involving sitting Tory MPs, many of them proven, don’t get spoken about at all. With the general election now just three weeks away, many of us Labour voters can’t but help think some of the reports or the vile comments are politically motivated.
I might even go so far as to suggest that some comments that are anti Labour and pro Tory seem to be well orchestrated. On this very site, presumably ‘Barry Johnson’ is getting paid extra Green Shield Stamps – or free pints at the Masonic Lodge, haha.
I’m not actually directing any of my comments at this particular news article.
But if you wanted to smear somebody, whether you associate with the far right or the far left, then you’d get personal. Ivor Caplin is Jewish but nobody dares go down that route openly. He came out as gay in later life and so maybe that’s seen as a way of discrediting him, even in a city like ours.
The story here does record that there are some bizarre images on his Twitter feed – now ‘X’ – but if you see Caplin’s other tweets you can tell that something is not right.
Those images have only appeared since the election was announced, and my quick research into ‘fake Titter feeds’ reveals that it’s very easy to clone a page and to reproduce it with all the original Tweets, but then with malicious stuff added. All of the soft-porn male pin up photos are supposed ‘re-tweets’ , and they don’t sit well at all with the other stuff posted, and maybe that’s why it’s obvious to me they are fake – and indeed to anyone who is not homophobic or already prejudiced against former Labour MP.
So, to answer your question, the ‘homophobia’ is in the use of those images to discredit Ivor Caplin, and maybe in this news article for reporting the presence of the dodgy images, without question.
I note that the similar Argus news report, chose to leave out this cloned attack on Caplin’s Twitter feed, and didn’t mention the so-called pornographic images at all.
On the plus side, we all get to express an opinion with meaning, on July 4th.
I personally can’t wait for this depressing period – of economic depression, national negativity, and nasty politics, to be over.
Billy, I have followed Ivor on Twitter for years and the pornographic tweets from his account started popping into my feed months and months ago.
I’ve spoken to multiple Labour members and Ivor himself, and there has never been any suggestion that the account has been hacked. The suggestion that I’ve somehow been fooled by a cloned account is a bit insulting frankly. As is the suggestion of homophobia or political motivation.
I mentioned them as they have been noticed fairly widely in local Labour circles (Guido Fawkes ran a story on them last week in fact), and so I could make it clear the suspension is in relation to a separate, more serious allegation.
Jo, it was not my intention to attack your news story and I added a line to make that clear. My apologies if you took it that way.
I’m simply raising the following ideas.
1) That the Twitter account might be cloned. I don’t got on Twitter – or X – but if you google ‘cloned twitter accounts’, as I did, then apparently it’s a regular thing.
2) My thinking is that the homophobia allegation is not in this news story but in the way someone has deliberately chosen to add gay porn to Ivor Caplin’s Twitter account, knowing that he is gay. As a smear, it works because it’s more believable to people who are homophobic.
3) But the Twitter account is full of Caplin’s Labour fanboy stuff which, frankly, comes across as very dull. And so it then stands out that there are also pin ups, which appear to have been re-tweeted, rather than added as direct posts.
4) To me, it makes no difference is the images are of men or are pin-ups of women – they don’t sit there comfortably, suggesting a hack, or else suggesting Mr Caplin is having a senior moment and may need some help.
5) My other point was an observation about how many attacks there are on Labour at the moment, and this seems in disproportion compared to attacks or news stories about Tory MPs and other candidates. If we go back to the US election where Trump won the vote from Hilary Clinton, it has now become clear how, before voting day, so many stories in the press were about Clinton’s emails, compared to the news stories about Trump’s dodgy business dealings, or his attitudes towards women. It’s now a sad part of modern politics that we have orchestrated smear campaigns like this. The fake news on social media sites like Tik Tok right now is shocking.
6) I may be completely wrong about a cloned Twitter account in this case, but we’ll see, I guess. I have never met Mr Caplin but his regular appearances on Latest TV during the Covid lockdowns, showed him to be a community spirited man.
One strand of your, um, logic appears to be that porn is OK if it’s gay porn.
Another is that potential misconduct should only be investigated and addressed if the suspect is heterosexual, otherwise it’s blatant homophobia.
It’s hard to work out whether you’re blinkered by identity politics, morally deficient or just a self-interested hypocrite.
Alice, I have no idea how you came to those conclusions after reading what I wrote.
Do I need to go away on a writing course?
We don’t know what the allegations are in this case, but we do have a tradition of assuming people are innocent until proven otherwise.
I have no views on porn, other than that the issue of consent is the same whether you are gay or straight or somewhere in between.
In this case I do find it strange that Twitter even allows inappropriate images to be seen, on a format that can be viewed by children without age verification.
Good riddance. He won’t be missed.
He hasn’t been an MP for almost 20 years!
Am looking forward to the third Labour MP head rolling. They all knew each other’s secrets and have no reason to keep them any more now they are falling.
Until Ivor became MP Hove was considered one of the safest Conservative seats in the country.
Unlike some other MPs he can point to his hard work and success locally in securing a home for the Albion after the loss of the Goldstone ground. He, Steve Bassam and others were great leaders politically and I doubt the AMEX would ever have come about without them.