Thread by @ChrisMasonBBC

Some of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest allies interfered in the independent process designed to deal with accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, former party officials have told @BBCPanorama

The former staffers say the leader’s office tried to provide ‘instruction’&officials brought in by the party’s General Secretary, Jennie Formby ‘downgraded’ some punishments to a ‘slap on the wrist’. Mr Corbyn insists his team has never interfered in disciplinary decisions.

But emails leaked to the programme suggest that Ms Formby tried to influence the selection of the disciplinary panel for the case of Jackie Walker, the former vice chair of the left wing campaign group, Momentum....

@later said that she would delete the correspondence on her official labour Party account. The emails also show that Jeremy Corbyn’s own personal email was copied in. Lab says that she temporarily stopped using her party email because of concerns a pol opponent had access to it.

The former General Secretary of the Labour Party, Iain McNichol, told Panorama that the evidence should ‘set alarm bells ringing across the party….to try to interfere politically within the NCC is just wrong."

Labour says the emails were "simply about ensuring the NCC is held accountable for the length of time they take to hear cases, and about protecting the party against any successful legal challenge on the basis of perceived bias if the same panel is used in high profile cases."

Another email shows Seumas Milne, one of Mr Corbyn’s closest aides, complained about the independent party process writing, "something's going wrong and we're muddling up political disputes with racism".

The party’s head of complaints at the time, Sam Matthews has told the programme this is, "the leader's office requesting to be involved directly in the disciplinary process".

He added: "This is not a helpful suggestion. It is an instruction." Labour says there was no interference, and claim the former staff making the claims are ‘disaffected’.

Panorama has also been told that on one occasion the leader’s office ordered batches of anti-semitism complaints to be brought to his office to be processed by his aides and can reveal that by this spring, there was a backlog of 1000 allegations of anti-semitism...

... and only 15 individuals had been expelled from the party.

A Labour spokesman said: "The Labour Party at all levels is implacably opposed to anti-Semitism and is determined to root out this social cancer from our movement and society."