This is a tale of two ex-ministers: the first ministerial casualties of Sir Keir Starmer’s government, after just six months in power. Spot the difference.
Louise Haigh, the crimson-haired left-wing former transport secretary, was thrown under the bus within hours of Sky News revealing a mobile phone fraud.
Yet Tulip Siddiq, the anti-corruption minister accused of links to corruption, was backed by the prime minister for nearly a month until she bowed to pressure to quit.
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Now MPs are making comparisons between the Labour high command’s response to both ex-ministers’ troubles. And not just by MPs on the left of Sir Keir’s party.
“What this shows is that if you’re a northern working-class woman, you’re out,” a senior MP first elected in Sir Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide told Sky News.
“But if you’re a member of the north London metropolitan elite and a friend of the prime minister you can survive for weeks.”
It was on the evening of 28 November that Sky News broke the story about Ms Haigh pleading guilty to misleading police by claiming a mobile phone had been stolen.
By 6am the following morning she was gone, on Friday 29 November – the day of the assisted dying debate in the Commons. A good day to bury bad news.
The first report that Ms Siddiq was involved in claims that she and her family were being investigated over corruption allegations in Bangladesh appeared in the Daily Mail on December 19.
At first, allies of the then Treasury minister and MP for Hampstead and Highgate claimed the allegations were “spurious”. Well, they’re not saying that now that she’s gone – eventually.
The problem for Ms Siddiq was the longer the controversy dragged on the allegations grew less spurious and more serious. What initially looked like unproven links began to look more plausible and less defensible.
For instance, Ms Siddiq claimed she never discussed politics with her aunt, ousted Bangladeshi premier Sheikh Hasina. However, last weekend Sky News revealed blogs in which she boasted about campaigning with her and celebrating an election victory.
So after almost a month of bad headlines, did Tulip Siddiq jump or was she pushed? Officially she resigned. But almost certainly the prime minister reluctantly told her the game was up when they spoke on the phone.
Ms Siddiq and Sir Keir are MPs for neighbouring north London constituencies. Their election counts have been at the same venue in Camden, hence the election night celebration photos together.
And Sir Keir clearly didn’t want to lose her, ending his letter accepting her resignation saying he wanted “to be clear that the door remains open for you going forward”. Generous.
But it was pretty clear from late last week that she would have to go. She pulled out – or was ordered to withdraw – from Rachel Reeves’ controversial trade trip to China.
And in the hours before she resigned, her absence from the government front bench during the chancellor’s Commons statement made it pretty obvious she was clearing her desk in the Treasury.
After quitting, she tweeted that the probe by the prime minister’s ethics watchdog, City grandee Sir Laurie Magnus, had confirmed she hadn’t breached the ministerial code or acted improperly.
Read more:
The background to the allegations against Tulip Siddiq
Who is Tulip Siddiq? The outgoing Labour minister with ties to Bangladesh
But the last paragraph of Sir Laurie’s three-page letter to Sir Keir was damning. It was “regrettable” that she wasn’t more alert to the potential risks to her reputation and that of the government of her close family’s links to Bangladesh, he said.
Regrettable? In other words, it didn’t look good and was damaging to the government. And then came the killer final sentence: “You will want to consider her ongoing responsibilities in the light of this.”
Sir Laurie – Eton, Oxford, a baronet, a City financier for 40 years and a pillar of the establishment – was telling the prime minister: “She may not have technically broken the rules, but my advice is she should go.”
Why did Sir Keir take so long to be persuaded that was the right outcome? He said for more than a week that he was going through the proper process and waiting for Sir Laurie’s verdict. A very Sir Keir approach to a problem.
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Kemi Badenoch said it was clear at the weekend that Ms Siddiq’s position was completely untenable, yet Sir Keir “dithered and delayed to protect his close friend”, alleging: “Weak leadership from a weak prime minister.”
The Tory leader will no doubt hammer home those arguments at Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, when she’ll also have the opportunity to turn up the heat on the embattled Ms Reeves over the turmoil in the economy.
It’s not just Tories who are accusing Sir Keir of dither and delay, however, and pointing to the contrasting treatment by No 10 of a northern working-class minister in trouble and a member of the so-called north London metropolitan elite.
