A MEMBER of the House of Lords has been branded “pathetic” after stealing a journalist’s microphone and putting it in the bin.
Lord Mann was threatened with the police during a tense interview with journalist Owen Jones at Labour conference in Liverpool.
The peer had previously stolen Jones’s microphone at last year’s conference and was approached by the journalist asking whether he planned to do so again as Jones attempted to ask him about new sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements.
Lord Mann could be seen to stuff the microphone into his pocket as he tried to change the topic to talk about his plans for an elected upper chamber in Westminster.
Last year, Lord Mann stole our microphone. It came after he claimed he'd never spoken about Israel, which had done - repeatedly. This time, this happened. pic.twitter.com/Pee9rk5DZZ
— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) September 29, 2026
Jones repeatedly tried to ask for the piece of equipment back as the pair walked around the conference floor.
After asking a number of times for the microphone to be returned, Jones said: “I don’t want to [get] the police involved but if you are going to insist on stealing my property, we’re going to have to take this a bit further. Do you want to go down that route?”
Lord Mann replied: “OK, yeah.”
Jones said: “What? So I have to get security to [get] my property back? Do I need to do that?”
He added: “It would be a bit embarrassing for a politician to have a police complaint about a stolen microphone, wouldn’t it?”
After Lord Mann puts the microphone into a bin, Jones said: “That is so pathetic.”
The peer, who served as the Labour MP for Bassetlaw between 2001 and 2019, was a prominent critic of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party.
He previously served as the chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Antisemitism and authored a review on the topic for the UK Government.
