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Labour has still not said what, if any, action it will take over Keith Vaz after he was suspended from Parliament over an encounter he had with male escorts in his flat.

The Leicester East MP’s six month suspension was confirmed in a vote by his colleagues in the House of Commons on Thursday.

They accepted Mr Vaz had shown a disregard for the law when he expressed a willingness to buy cocaine for others to use during a late night meeting on August 27 2016, and has damaged the reputation of Parliament.

Labour’s chief whip Nicholas Brown MP said the party accepted in full the findings of a three year investigation into Mr Vaz, triggered by a Sunday Mirror story and a subsequent complaint by Tory MP Andrew Bridgen.

However Mr Vaz remains the Labour General Election candidate in Leicester East, having been re-selected a few weeks before the publication of the standards report.

He has not had the whip withdrawn.

This means that if nothing changes and Mr Vaz is re-elected on December 12 he will be unable to take up his seat until his suspension ends and then he could still face a recall petition to give voters in Leicester East the chance to oust him.

LeicestershireLive has contacted the national Labour Party, the East Midlands regional party and the Leicester East Constituency Labour Party for clarification on Mr Vaz’s position but none have responded.

Mr Vaz has said he will not comment on the standards findings and was taken to hospital last week shortly after the report was published.

LeicestershireLive understands Mr Vaz’s hospitalisation has made it more problematic for Labour to take action but that the Nation Executive Committee is due to discuss the situation this week.

Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, a close ally of Mr Vaz’s, has said he should resign.

The Committee on Standards said Mr Vaz’s contention that the men who came to his flat at 11.30pm on a Saturday night were interior decorators not prostitutes was ‘ludicrous’.

They said Mr Vaz had tried to ‘throw dust in the eyes’ of investigators and done his best to ‘complicate, obfuscate and confuse the inquiry’.

Mr Vaz denied this in a statement issued on his website but that statement was deleted on Thursday after being heavily criticised by MPs in the Commons.