Labour MP sends ‘Scrooge’ Jacob Rees-Mogg copy of A Christmas Carol

The Labour politician who asked Rees-Mogg to encourage his rich friends to pay their fair share has since responded to the MP by sending him a copy of the Charles Dickens book.

Zarah Sultana quipped it couldn’t have been on the reading list at Eton College where the leader of the Commons studied.

She wrote on Instagram: “The speaker encouraged me to show ‘Christmas spirit’ to Jacob Rees-Mogg.

“His comments to me about Unicef don’t deserve it. But I thought I’d try all the same.”

Raising the matter during business questions, Sultana said: “For the first time ever, Unicef, the UN agency responsible for providing humanitarian aid to children, is having to feed working-class kids in the UK.

“But while children go hungry, a wealthy few enjoy obscene riches. From Tory donors handed billions in dodgy contracts to people like the Leader of the House, who is reportedly in line to receive an £800,000 dividend payout this year.

“So will (Rees-Mogg) give the government time to discuss the need to make him and his super-rich chums pay their fair share so that we can end the grotesque inequality that scars our society?”

Rees-Mogg replied: “I think it is a real scandal that Unicef should be playing politics in this way when it is meant to be looking after people in the poorest, the most deprived, countries of the world where people are starving, where there are famines and where there are civil wars, and they make cheap political points of this kind, giving, I think, £25,000 to one council. It is a political stunt of the lowest order.”

He added: “Unicef should be ashamed of itself”.

Anna Kettley, Unicef UK’s director of programmes and advocacy, said: “Unicef UK is responding to this unprecedented crisis and building on our 25 years’ experience of working on children’s rights in the UK with a one-off domestic response, launched in August, to provide support to vulnerable children and families around the country during this crisis period.”