Ubiquitous Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham has had to admit that he ‘spent’ £25,000 in a disastrous and embarrassing threat to sue his counterpart Jeremy Hunt.
Burnham has had to declare donations in kind of £16,665 worth of legal services offered by Steel & Shamash, the Labour Party’s solicitors, and £8,250 from Gavin Millar QC, a barrister who specialises in defamation proceedings. Students of North London Labour Kremlinology will be aware that Millar is the brother of Fiona Millar, the left-wing agitator and partner of Alastair Campbell. He was last seen taking down Tory MP Andrew Mitchell in the High Court.
In October 2013 Burnham huffed and puffed and whined to anyone that would listen that he was consulting lawyers over a claim from Hunt that he had tried to cover-up failing hospitals when Labour were in power. Hunt and the Tories refused to blink and did not withdraw the allegation. It appears that Burnham did not take his hollow threat any further than accepting a great deal of potentially costly legal advice.
The self-styled NHS champion and man of the people was widely derided at the time for resorting to legal threats to try to silence criticism of his tenure as Secretary of State for Health, and it now transpires it would have been a very expensive mistake had the lawyers not been working pro bono as a donation in kind.
Of course, this is not even Burnham’s first brush with libel law. In 2008 was forced to apologise to Liberty’s Shami Chakrabarti to avoid being sued, after implying that she had had an improper relationship with top Tory David Davis.
Another pretty embarrassing dent to Burnham’s poorly disguised leadership ambitions.
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