Valerie Vaz’s month goes from bad to worse. The Labour MP was one of just two frontbenchers sacked by Keir Starmer a fortnight ago in the wake of the party’s Hartlepool defeat. The surprise move prompted political journalists to joke that sacking Vaz as shadow leader of the House had been just the response red wall voters were demanding.
But Vaz appears to have done her career little good today after a bizarre moment on Politics Live this afternoon. The MP decided that this was the moment to speculate about the state of Boris Johnson’s health during his Covid fight at the beginning of April 2020, telling baffled panelists that the Prime Minister wasn’t as ill in intensive care as the public were led to believe.
Her intervention was all the more bizarre given that the topic of conversation was about Dominic Cummings who is due to give evidence to parliament on Wednesday. Vaz told viewers:
Remember, the PM was in hospital for a while, erm, not quite at death’s door, that we were led to believe… I don’t know, I wasn’t in the room… OK so he was in intensive care I don’t know I wasn’t his doctor
Mr S was somewhat surprised to hear Vaz make this claim given that all the evidence appears to point the other way. Briefings from No. 10 at the time were claiming how well Johnson was, that he was ‘in good spirits’ doing his red boxes of government papers. Subsequently it emerged that the Prime Minister’s condition had been far graver than Downing Street was willing to admit, with nurse Jenny McGee telling a Channel 4 documentary:
All around him there was lots and lots of sick patients, some of whom were dying. I remember seeing him and thinking he looked very, very unwell. He was a different colour really.
Valerie is of course the sister of the infamous Keith Vaz, whose scandal-ridden antics have provided numerous headaches to successive Labour leaders since the turn of the century. Looks like such mishaps clearly run in the family, if Valerie Vaz’s uninvited musings are anything to go by.
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