[Gayle]

Well, as you can imagine I am going to defend Greg. I find him to be a very hard working person who spends as much time in his constituency as he does in parliament. He stands up for what he believes and I think that's quite probably why he hasn't risen through the Labour ranks.

As for his stance on the war - yes, he voted for it and yes, on the face of things you can argue that he shouldn't have done that if his constituency appeared to want the opposite, however, his constituents were working off information that they were reading in the national newspapers, they were not working from the official information that MPs were receiving. He was in the most informed position and he voted for it - as did David Cameron and the majority of both Labour and Conservative MPs.

I know people disagree with the war and think that the troops should be pulled out but once we've made the mess I do think we should be around to clear it up. Also, I wish people would stop beating Labour up for taking us to war when David Cameron has stated on more than one occassion that he would have done precisely the same thing himself based on the information that they had at the time.