Rochdale Labour dump Brown!

12.00.00am UTC (GMT +0000) Wed 24th Sep 2008

Rochdale MP Paul Rowen has accused the local Labour Party of "dumping Gordon Brown"!

Rochdale and District Labour Party had a photo of Gordon Brown on their website that has recently been replaced with a photo of David Miliband!

Paul Rowen said: "Everybody knows that Labour is disillusioned with Gordon Brown but this is an amazing snub. This lack of loyalty says everything about the local Labour Party. Only last year, Simon Danczuk was happily posing with Gordon Brown at a pre-arranged photo shoot claiming he was discussing all sorts about Rochdale. It's now clear that because he is not the flavour of the month, he has abandoned Gordon Brown. I await the pre-arranged, synthetic snap of Simon Danczuk shaking hands with David Miliband! This smacks of opportunism, there is absolutely no need to use a picture of an MP from South Shields - unless they know something we don't!"

The Labour Party refutes the claim saying the website has been "hacked"!

Paul Rowen's agent, David Hennigan posted on the Rochdale Online message board: "We received a call from the Daily Express today regarding a press release I'd written. Basically the Labour Party in Rochdale had replaced a picture of Gordon Brown with David Miliband. Whoever they contacted claimed that I had 'hacked' into the site and replaced the picture. Now anyone who knows me will know that I can't do that."