Nick Brown returned to his job as Labour’s chief whip in Jeremy Corbyn’s post-conference reshuffle for the same reason that he left it 18 years earlier. Tony Blair appointed him in 1997, but sacked him a year later, fearing that his fixer was no longer working for him and acting instead for his Downing Street rival, Gordon Brown.
In 2016, Jeremy Corbyn, too, came to fear that his chief whip, Rosie Winterton, was working not for him but for Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson. So he replaced her with Nick Brown, making him the only person to have served as a Labour whip in three decades.
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