He loves it: the overgrown schoolboy that some of us put in charge of the country thinks it’s a terrific wheeze that he can flout the rules in our faces and get away with it.
This is typical of Boris Johnson and his government.
They deliberately break the rules by which we all have to live, just to show us that they can.
If Boris Johnson wrongly used public funds to make a party political visit to Hartlepool ahead of this year’s by-election there, it wasn’t an accident.
Of course, a row has sprung up after the Conservative Party’s spending return did not include the cost of the trip – which was by private jet, let’s all remember:
It’s not just using taxpayers’ money for a campaign trip.
It’s not just breaking the ministerial code.
It’s that the host of the COP26 climate conference takes a plane to Hartlepool, just as he took one to Cornwall for the G7
Johnson flew by private jet from London Stansted to Teesside International Airport, travelling in a motorcade to Middlesbrough, where he conducted official government business promoting a rise in the minimum wage at the DIY store B&Q.
He was then driven to Hartlepool, where he met with the Conservative candidate Jill Mortimer for a visit to the local company Hart Biologicals, supporting her campaign in the constituency.
The pair then visited a nearby housing estate for doorknocking, leafleting, and speaking to residents, the Hartlepool Mail reported.
That afternoon, Johnson flew back from Teesside International Airport to Stansted.
None of the costs of Johnson’s travel by plane or car appear to be included in the spending return, which says the candidate spent nothing on transport.
The Labour Party has demanded an inquiry into the breach of spending rules, which is also a breach of the Ministerial Code (government ministers must not use public money for party political business).
This Writer doesn’t understand why she didn’t take it straight to the police – unless this is tacit acknowledgement that MPs are above the law and the police simply wouldn’t lift a finger.
I wonder also why the Electoral Commission has not become involved, as election spending is a matter for that organisation and failure to declare it properly is also a criminal offence.
Perhaps this is a reason Labour is going so easy on the matter:
Not only did Jezza never charter a private jet on expenses, he probably didn't even put in his legit claim for a puncture repair kit
That Jeremy Corbyn. How dare he show everybody else up by being honest!
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Now you see her…: Keir Starmer seems to have been taking notes from the Tories again – he has kept a scapegoat handy to take the blame for his failures. But it isn’t working.
Keir Starmer has thrown the Labour Party into a pit of bitter recriminations after its local election disaster, sacking soft-left MPs from the shadow cabinet rather than taking responsibility for his decisions.
The principle scapegoat appears to be Angela Rayner – who is certainly no angel, but is unlikely to have been responsible for the catastrophe in Hartlepool, which was apparently run from Starmer’s own office by his personal private secretary Jenny Chapman. She is not in the firing-line, it seems, despite having chosen the candidate and the date of the by-election. She was also the person who communicated all decisions about the campaign to other party members and MPs.
Other victims of Starmer’s reshuffle appear to be Annaliese Dodds and Lisa Nandy, prompting questions about the Labour leader’s misogyny against women from northern England.
Kieth doing the thing men do of blaming the woman in their life
What does Keir Starmer have against northern women?
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥 (@WarmongerHodges) May 8, 2021
I spent Saturday (May 8) watching this farce unfold on Twitter as a panicking Labour leader deliberately set his party on self-destruct in order to divert blame from himself.
Let’s start here, with a couple of comments about the broad effect of Starmer’s decisions:
Starmer: "I intend to not only take responsibility for the results but to take responsibility for fixing things." #StarmerOut🥀 pic.twitter.com/J90GR9lul8
Lots of talk from Labour 'grown-ups' about 'climbing a mountain' whilst all along it's been clear to anyone paying attention that they've actually been digging a hole.
— Prof Gayle Letherby 💙 #PeaceAndJustice (@gletherby) May 7, 2021
Rayner’s sacking fooled nobody. It was taken as an attempt by Starmer to deflect blame from himself and avoid taking responsibility. Most considered it a desperate attempt to avoid calls for his own resignation and/or a vote of “no confidence” in his leadership.
Starmer said he would accept full responsibilty for the election results. So he fires Angela Raynor. I guess being a good socialist , he feels the need to "share" the blame,spread it around a bit, instead of keeping it all to himself.#CynicalMe.
There is an upside to this, as some were quick to notice. Rayner’s sacking could be an opportunity for long-suppressed information to come out:
I hope that when she stormed out of the office Angela Rayner had a copy of the #FordeReport in her handbag.
— Helen the Zen 🏴 💙 (@helenmallam) May 8, 2021
But I don’t think it will. Rayner may have backstabbed Jeremy Corbyn as soon as it suited her but he was no longer in a position of power at the time. Starmer is, and she is still an ambitious politician.
Indeed, it is possible that her prior, unscrupulous, behaviour was intended by Starmer to mitigate in his favour; a backstabbing schemer having her comeuppance after failing to deliver an expected election victory.
But that is to assume that Labour members and supporters are stupid, which is (again) not a good look for a leader. Commenters pointed out that it is entirely possible for Rayner to be an opportunist who sold out the Left – and for her sacking to be an act of cowardice and diversion:
It's possible to believe that Angela Rayner sold out the Left & at the same time think that her sacking by the man who promised to 'take full responsibility' is both cowardly & naive.
— Prof Gayle Letherby 💙 #PeaceAndJustice (@gletherby) May 8, 2021
Imagine being Angela Rayner right now, having sold out every single one of your convictions only to be stabbed in the back by the spineless immoral chancer you schemed with & trusted
The verdict: Rayner deserved to be ditched – but for something she did herself, rather than a defeat that was not her fault.
Bizarrely, after the party leadership realised sacking Rayner had only undermined Starmer further, attempts were made to backtrack. I’ll say more about that later, but what’s remarkable here is that these efforts only made matters worse. Here’s how, in two short tweets:
One Starmer ally offers this version of events: "She is not being sacked. She is being used differently in the team because of her working class appeal." Stresses Rayner is still deputy leader and will get a new shadow cabinet role. "She is not being sacked from the team."
And what about the woman who’s alleged to have been genuinely responsible for the loss of Hartlepool? Tim Shipman, political editor of The Sunday Times, tweeted a very odd snippet of information and immediately deleted it – but it’s out there and we need to know what to make of it:
If Starmer was having an affair with his secretary then events would have turned really grisly (if cliched). The tweet raises questions about why a Labour apparatchik who is apparently responsible for the failed Hartlepool campaign is avoiding the axe when there is a strong suggestion of animosity against her. What leverage does she have?
In the wider Parliamentary Labour Party, it is being reported that the sacking of Rayner has been met with shock:
Labour MPs pretty gobsmacked at apparent move to pin blame for elections at Angela Rayner – astonishment across the board from left to right
The New Statesman was quick to follow up on this with an article featuring comments from some of these MPs, as follows:
“It is wrong on every level,” said one Labour shadow cabinet minister. “Keir Starmer said he would take ‘full responsibility’. I don’t see how sacking Angela does that. You can’t be sacking Angela Rayner, who is a working-class northern woman who’s been working her arse off. It’s madness.”
(She’s not working-class, in fact. She might have been, once, but if you’re deputy leader of the largest political party in the UK, then by definition you cannot be working-class.)
“The PLP is absolutely gobsmacked,” another frontbencher said. “We know Angela had nothing to do with the defeat in Hartlepool.” Rayner was officially the Campaign Coordinator of these elections, but MPs are adamant she was not the decision-maker in relation to the Hartlepool by-election. “Everything has been decided by the leader’s office,” one shadow cabinet member said.
“This is utter madness. Angela Rayner is not the problem. The PLP is up in arms and even my local party is outraged. At the advice of Ben Nunn [director of communications] and Chris Ward [another aide in the leader’s office], Keir is doubling down and making a deliberate shift rightwards,” one MP from the party’s left said.
So now we have a few more names to watch. If Starmer is being influenced by unelected suits, then he is certainly not fit for his job. The leader should form policy, not his flunkies.
Many Labour MPs have yet to provide their opinions. Simon Vessey, below, suggests a reason for that – and Mary-Ellen provides good advice:
If I was a Labour MP, I'd be steering well clear of Starmer. He's going to crash and burn.
But one Labour source, quoted by the ever-reliable (ha ha) Gabriel Pogrund of The Sunday Times, suggested that Rayner’s sacking could split Labour apart:
Labour source: "Sacking Angela to save Jenny’s arse is a very very stupid thing to have done. This will cause civil war. And Keir will lose it."
Many have been saying that this was Starmer’s objective all along.
If so, then his possible choice to replace Rayner – and other colleagues likely to feel the axe – should finish the job. What madness could possibly influence him into thinking Wes Streeting might be a reasonable choice to chair the Labour Party?
The word from the Labour party tonight is that Wes Streeting, the "bag man " between BOD and Starmer , and one of the prime designers of the Anti Semitism catalogue of lies against Corbyn, will replace Rayner as Chair of the party.
— neil flek waugh . CITIZEN NOT SERF.BODYBAGBORIS (@sammythedog1989) May 8, 2021
Rayner was not the only ShadCab member in line for a sacking – although at the time of writing she is the only one on whom the axe has already fallen.
Other names facing banishment to the backbenches include Lisa Nandy…
Nandy next out the door? Christ I’m opening the wine. This is going to be a *night* 🍷 https://t.co/VIVOZPxJoe
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza 🏳️🌈 (@TheMendozaWoman) May 8, 2021
Sir @Keir_Starmer has been on the phone again. @lisanandy – being an untitled northern woman – also has to go. #SnakesInASack. PS: Sir Keir stressed, however, he really was taking full responsibility, on the journey up the mountain to the fork in the road.
bit choose me choose me, Philips for one, she fancies her chances the only trouble is that will be a bad move, the woman who wanted to Knife Corbyn when kids were dying from being knifed in the streets, she has little common sense and just a big mouth, RW Lab is imploding.
— Isobel_Waby DEFEND CORBYN (@Isobel_waby) May 8, 2021
Nick Brown (who?)…
Starmer never tells people directly. He hasn't spoken to Corbyn since he removed the whip. He's the biggest coward in politics. https://t.co/W1q3pgA6uk
Shadow cabinet source on sackings to come: "People engaging in sustained briefing against staff who can’t defend themselves should be looking over their shoulders."👀
Did you spot some of the names touted as replacements?
They are the aforementioned Wes Streeting, along with Rachel Reeves, Jess Phillips, and Steve Reed – all members of what you might call Labour’s hard-right.
Also mooted for a comeback are New Labour hardliners Yvette Cooper and Hilary “my father is spinning in his grave” Benn.
Commenter Simon Maginn described these possibilities as “a right-turn so hard it’d give you whiplash”.
— leftworks #WeAreCorbyn #IStandWithJeremyCorbyn (@leftworks1) May 8, 2021
None of the above makes Starmer look any better after Thursday’s election shocks. It all makes him look much worse.
So, guess what? It seems he has spotted the backlash on the social media – and is now backpedalling furiously. Announcements about who is to be sacked have stopped being leaked to favoured mainstream media stenographers and it seems he has run away to hide think:
Sound of screeching brakes? I'm hearing the reshuffle may have stalled because of the backlash to Angela Rayner's sacking
Harold Macmilllan never recovered from the ‘night of the long knives’ because of the general view that the problem was him, not the Cabinet members he was sacking
Starmer is either the least effective LOTO in history or he is the most effective ‘plant’ in history, with the intention of destroying the Labour Party. Either way he needs to go!
— Corrie Drew #KillTheBill (@CorrieDrew) May 8, 2021
If Andrew Adonis is right, it is only a matter of time until Starmer has to go. If Andrew Feinstein and Rachel Shabi are right, he’ll delay doing so until the moment that will do the most crippling harm to the party’s future election hopes.
We will judge him – and his advisers – by his decisions.
The clock is ticking.
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Are you sitting uncomfortably? Keir Starmer’s relationship to the Labour leader has become akin to that of a squatter in an abandoned house after the loss of Hartlepool in yesterday’s by-election.
I honestly don’t know if Keir Starmer has failed dramatically, or actually achieved his goal.
As leader of the Opposition, his party’s loss in Hartlepool is devastating. A constituency that has been a Labour stronghold since it was created in 1974 has passed to the Conservatives. It means no Labour seat is safe from the Tories.
But many critics have suggested that Starmer’s job as a right-wing Labour leader has been to ensure that – at a time when the Conservatives are burdened with a corrupt and incapable leader, the consequences of failed Brexit and Covid policies, and rampant cronyism – Labour still cannot win an election.
If the latter is true, then he has succeeded monumentally.
Any sincere Labour leader would see that his time is up; his policies have failed and it is time to go.
But Starmer was silent when he left his house today (May 7). Maybe it is too soon to make official announcements (although Corbyn was prompt enough after the 2019 general election result).
He had claimed he would “carry the can” if the result was poor – but This Writer fears it is more likely that he will try to pass the buck instead.
Already Peter Mandelson has tried to blame the disaster on what he called “the two Cs – Covid and Corbyn”.
Many people consider him to be a certain kind of C, too.
His comment is reminiscent of the claims made by the Tory government many times since they took office in 2010, whenever they have been criticised over a policy failure – that the fault lay with the previous Labour administration.
The facts betray the lie in both cases. Here, it is more than a year since Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party. Starmer had himself elected as a “continuity Corbyn” candidate, sure – but he subsequently dumped every single policy promise he made, replacing them with nothing.
As a result, voters were left with no idea what StarmerLabour represents – and it seems to me that this is what has put people off, more than the shadow of the previous leader.
As former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said, “You cannot go into an election without any policy programme, without explaining what sort of society you want. You can’t send candidates out there naked without policies to advocate.”
But that’s what Starmer did. There is also the question of whether he foisted an unwanted candidate on Hartlepool’s Labour party by interfering with the selection process (as suggested in certain parts of the social media).
Even right-wing Shadow Culture Minister Alison McGovern has implied that voters don’t consider Labour to be a viable alternative to a one-party state run by the Conservatives.
She said: “There are lots of people who will have voted Conservative with a heavy heart – who want there to be an alternative,” implying that people don’t see Labour as an alternative any more. And who can deny this after a year of Starmer supporting one Tory policy after another?
“The way to do that is to offer people a set of policies that give them hope for the future, [hope] that we don’t live in a one-party Tory state, that things can be better and different,” she added, implying that people think we do live in a one-party Tory state, and that Starmer’s leadership of Labour has turned it into a pale-blue imitation of the Tories that provides no alternative but merely shores up the corrupt Johnson government.
The most risible comment so far came from hard-right “Labour First” activist Luke Akehurst, who managed to get himself onto Labour’s National Executive Committee under Starmer. He said Labour needs to make sure it is relevant and talking about issues that big swathes of the electorate care about – which is hilarious considering the way his wing of the party has diligently steered it away from those issues.
Apparently the left-wing Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs is planning to demand radical reform of the party, possibly including a shift to a federal structure in England, with cities and regions having their own leaders who then exert influence over the Westminster leader.
This would de-centralise power, ensuring that Starmer could not force right-wing, un-Labour policies on the wider party membership. That would have the advantage of ensuring that Labour had a strong direction – if the local leaders could agree a policy position with party HQ.
But it also runs the risk of fragmentation.
An alternative suggested by the BBC is that Labour could re-focus itself as the centre of a combined Opposition, allying with other parties like the Greens. This risks a watering-down of some policies, which is exactly the problem that many believe Starmer has created.
No matter what happens in the long term, the short-term problem can be summed up in two words: Keir Starmer.
He has to go. The longer he delays, the worse Labour’s plight – and that of the UK as a whole under Boris Johnson’s corrupt Tories – will become. And this brings us back to the big question: is that what Starmer wants?
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Voting: but will people in Hartlepool vote Labour after the contempt with which Keir Starmer has (allegedly) treated them?
A poll – with, admittedly, a tiny number of respondents – has suggested that the Conservatives could take Hartlepool from Labour in Thursday’s by-election.
Is this because Keir Starmer steamrolled over the wishes of local part members to parachute a right-wing candidate in?
The behaviour of Labour’s head office with regard to the election has been, reportedly, a disgrace – and if this is how Starmer plans to run the party, then voters in Hartlepool will be right to abandon him.
The problem is that the Conservatives are likely to benefit from it.
Starmer is already facing criticism that his daft antics have strengthened the Tories. How will he be able to justify himself if they take Hartlepool?
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