Poor Keir Starmer appears to have the reverse Midas touch. When he awoke this morning, Labour was making gains across the country – the capitalist citadels of London were falling, marginals like Southampton were going red and the seemingly inexorable advance of the Tories in the Red Wall had been halted. Yet as sure as night follows day, mere hours after Sir Keir’s triumphalist victory photo call, Durham Police announced it would be conducting an investigation into ‘Beergate’ – dispatching the news like Zeus submitting thunderbolts down from on high.
The news that Sir Keir is under investigation somewhat puts pause to Labour’s current claims to being the morally virtuous party in British politics. Starmer of course previously said that the mere fact that the Metropolitan police had opened an investigation into Boris Johnson was cause for the Prime Minister to resign – something which the leader of the opposition is conspicuously yet to do. So it was no great surprise then that Sir Keir’s interview this afternoon about the Durham developments was something of a car-crash, which curiously recalled his efforts from exactly one year ago this week.
"We were working in the office, we stopped for something to eat. No party, no breach of the rules," says Sir Keir Starmer
Watching the former Director of Public Prosecutions squirm, Mr S was reminded of a similar clip by another Labour leader who had a similarly unfortunate habit of seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. Starmer gurned and chortled, gaily asserting that there was ‘No parties, no breach of the rules!’ with all the earnestness of a schoolboy caught smoking behind the bike sheds. His repeated robotic protestations of innocence brought to mind Ed Miliband in June 2011, condemning public sector workers going on strike.
Will Sir Keir follow in Ed’s footsteps and prove to be yet another Labour leader who can’t win an election?
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