A senior government minister was forced to look on awkwardly as a Labour MP who dramatically quit the party launched an outspoken attack on Keir Starmer’s government.

Rosie Duffield stunned Westminster on Saturday night by announcing that she was resigning less than three months after the general election.

She blamed Keir Starmer’s “cruel and unnecessary” policies as well as the freebies row which has engulfed the prime minister in recent weeks.

On Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC1, Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden was shown in the studio watching a pre-recorded interview with Duffield, who was elected MP for Canterbury in 2017.

She said: “I’m ashamed of the fact that we stood up, rightly, and condemned all of the last few years of what we saw as Tory sleaze and all of the things that brought politics into disrepute.

“We’ve always held ourselves up as a party that will do better, that will clear out the rot, and here we are, it’s daily revelations of hypocrisy and grubby presents. I can’t believe what I’m reading every single day.

“All of us had donations for the election. I didn’t like it, but I had to crowdfund because I got very little money from unions and the party this time, and you feel a bit grubby doing that. But I had some lovely friends and some generous donations myself for leaflets and things.

“But when you’ve got people with so much more money than the average person spending somebody’s yearly salary on their own clothes without feeling that they have to apologise or explain, I just feel like I’m not getting anywhere with trying to get that from my leader, and I needed to go.”

She added: “It’s greed. Why else would someone on so much more money than most people take free gifts? Why? He can absolutely afford his own clothes, we all can.

“I haven’t seen anything that explains why that’s OK. And then to see us cutting the money to people who earn a fraction of what we do, it’s mass hypocrisy and I can’t be a part of that.”

The MP said Starmer’s government was “more about greed and power than making a difference, and I can’t take it any more”.

Asked if Starmer had “a problem with women”, Duffield replied: “I’m afraid I do. I’ve experienced it myself. Most backbenchers that I’m friends with are women, most of us refer to the young men who surround him as ‘the lads’, and it’s very clear that the lads are in charge.”

Responding to her attack, Pat McFadden said she had been “disillusioned with the party leader” for a long time.

He said: “I don’t think this is something that just developed in the last few months.

“I’m disappointed to see her go. I like Rosie, but ultimately I’m not surprised at the decision that she has made.”

Asked if he was one of the “lads” around the PM, McFadden said: “I think I’m a bit too old to be a lad.

“Some of the stuff in [Duffield’s resignation] letter I just don’t accept.

“I see ministers turning up to work every day and what’s on their mind is how to stabilise the economy and get it growing again, how to turn around the NHS, how to get more houses built, how to improve rights at work for people, how to get more opportunity into schools.

“That’s what the ministers around that Cabinet table are focused on. They believe in public service.”

A Labour MP has quit the party less than three months since its landslide election victory.

Rosie Duffield blamed Keir Starmer’s “cruel and unnecessary” policies as well as the freebies row which has engulfed Keir Starmer in recent weeks.

The Canterbury MP announced her shock decision in an interview with the Sunday Times.

Duffield, a former Labour whip who was first elected as an MP in 2017, identified the decision to axe winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners, as well as keeping the two-child benefit cap, as the main reasons for her move.

In her resignation letter to the PM, she said: “Although many ‘last straws’ have led to my decision, my reason for leaving now is the programme of policies you seem determined to stick to, however unpopular they are with the electorate and your own MPs.

“You repeat often that you will make the ‘tough decisions’ and that the country is ‘all in this together’. But those decisions do not directly affect any one of us in parliament.

“They are cruel and unnecessary, and affects hundreds of thousands of our poorest, most vulnerable constituents. This is not what I was elected to do. It is not even wise politics, and it certainly is not ‘the politics of service’.”

Duffield also condemned the “sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice” which has seen the PM, his wife and other senior Labour figures accept clothes, concert tickets and other hospitality from supporters.

“The sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice are off the scale, she said.

“I am so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party.”

Duffield, who has clashed with Starmer in the past over the issue of trans rights, has grown increasingly critical of the prime minister in recent weeks.

In a direct attack on the PM, she wrote: “As prime minister, your managerial style and technocratic approach, and lack of basic politics and political instincts, have come crashing down on us as a party after we worked so hard, promised so much, and waited a long 14 years to be mandated by the British public to return to power.

“Since the change of government in July, the revelations of hypocrisy have been staggering and increasingly outrageous. I cannot put into words how angry I and my colleagues are at your total lack of understanding about how you have made us all appear.

“How dare you take our longed-for victory, the electorate’s sacred and precious trust, and throw it back in their individual faces and the faces of dedicated and hardworking Labour MPs?”

Duffield added: “The Labour Party was formed to speak for those of us without a voice, and I stood for election partly because I saw decisions about the lives of those like me being made in Westminster by only the most privileged few.

“Right now, I cannot look my constituents in the eye and tell them that anything has changed. I hope to be able to return to the party in the future, when it again resembles the party I love, putting the needs of the many before the greed of the few.”