November 21st 2009

It has been brought to our attention that the word 'threatening' we used (in relation to part of Plymouth MP Gary Streeter's letter to constituent Bernadette McManus) did not represent him fairly. He is, we have been assured, generally an 'affable' human being concerned to do the best for families. So in the interests of fairness, we have added the footnotes below.

Threats

Back in 1998, Mr Streeter was censured by the Law Society for being engaged in a civil case where he had a conflict of interest. The Society fined him £1000, and shortly afterwards he resigned from his law firm Foot & Bowden. Obviously, there was no connection between these two events, because on the eve of his tribunal hearing Gary Streeter gave this on the record statement to trade magazine The Lawyer:

"I resigned from the partnership because of my promotion to the shadow cabinet - and if you for a second imply that it was because of this [hearing] I'll sue the pants off you."

Families

There was a Gareth Streeter working as a Parliamentary Assistant in 2003. This was Mr Streeter's son, as revealed by Times online in their posting of October16th 2003. And five years on – in April 2008 - the Daily Telegraph noted:

‘Streeter said that he employed both his wife, Janet Streeter, and his daughter, Tamsin Streeter, as researchers...he gave a little more information yesterday, explaining that Tamsin is paid up to £9,999 to “run” his ”website community page and discussion page.” This is the “website community page”, which looks to me re markably like a list of (poorly) cut-and-pasted emails from people publicising their own events (an unmanned online bulletin board could do a neater job). There is no “discussion page” on Gary Streeter’s website'. 

We are happy to set the record straight re this one.

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