It looks on the face of things as if Sir Keir Starmer is coming unstuck over that blurry photograph of him with beer in hand after a day campaigning in Durham during lockdown.
His claim that no rules were breached on that occasion – like the earlier claims that Angela Rayner wasn’t there and that the curry was a spontaneous, ambushed-by-a-curry type of curry rather than a planned, party type of curry – is looking shakier than Shakin’ Stevens with the DTs. Beergate, thanks to new revelations in the Mail On Sunday, seems to have legs. But where do those legs, I wonder, take us?
Let’s suppose that everything that Sir Keir’s detractors say is true. Let’s not minimise the offence. Let us say that he did, in fact, order and consume a chicken korma and an indeterminate number of bhajis with icy premeditation, and that afterwards he told a stinking pack of inadvertently misspokes about it. Let us say that, far from being a necessary fuelling break in the working day, as originally claimed, it was a recreational curry; that his tummy knew it as such, did secretly delight in it, and that he did not do another stroke of work between naan time and bedtime. Let us say that as many as fifteen Labour staffers were involved, that the local MP Mary Foy and deputy leader Angela Rayner stopped in for a beer and a chinwag, and that a good time, shamefully, was had by all.
If Sir Keir promoted the rules, the Prime Minister wrote them. If Sir Keir had one party, the Prime Minister had eighteen. And so on
At the very least, as my colleague Fraser Nelson argued yesterday, this puts Mr Starmer right in the soup. He is, as Fraser argued, ‘caught in a web of his own words’; or, as Dominic Raab put it on yesterday morning’s media gloat-round, ‘guilty of rank double standards’. It makes his full-throated call for the Prime Minister’s resignation over Partygate look opportunistic and hypocritical. It makes his vocal support for more lockdown rules look opportunistic and hypocritical. And, conceivably, it puts a former director of public prosecutions in the frame for a criminal offence. Not good at all.
It has also had the effect of causing many of those people who were most Cromwellian about the Prime Minister and Chancellor’s transgressions – who laughed themselves hoarse at ‘ambushed by a cake’ – to scrabble around mounting many of the same defences (he ate a curry with colleagues, for goodness sake – let’s get a sense of proportion!) that they so scornfully rejected when it was the other team in trouble. Symmetrically, all those urging a sense of proportion over a harmless bit of cake are now shrieking like furies over a poppadum.
But though it’s bad for Keir Starmer, perhaps even politically fatal for Keir Starmer, I don’t see how it in any way gets the Prime Minister off the hook – which is what the most enthusiastic pushers of Beergate as a story, i.e. the Prime Minister’s spinners and his backbench fan-club, hope it will do. In the first place, this is an instance of the tu quoque fallacy. ‘The other lot are just as bad’ is a truly feeble last line of defence; and nor does it address the substance of the issue.
If it’s bad for Keir Starmer to break lockdown rules, the hypocrisy of it to one side, it’s bad for the PM to do so. Indeed, it’s pretty obviously worse – because the PM was in charge of drawing up those rules in the first place, and presided over the guilt-inducing ad campaigns which promoted them.
And the moral test against which that rule-breaking takes place is not the probity or otherwise of the leader of the opposition. The question for the Prime Minister (to adapt those minatory posters formulated by the Nudge Unit or, as it may be, Crunching Rugby Tackle Unit) is not ‘can you look Keir Starmer in the eye?’, but ‘can you look the thousands of people who stuck to the rules and missed their relatives’ funerals in the eye?’.
That doesn’t change just because Keir Starmer now looks to be in the sin bin too. Every righteous blow that lands on Sir Keir – that he bent both the letter and the spirit of the lockdown rules; that he agitated for harsher lockdowns while dodging their requirements when it suited him; that he lied about it afterwards; that the police are taking an interest in the matter – rebounds twice as hard on the Prime Minister. If the case of Sir Keir is at the looking-a-bit-bang-to-rights stage of the process, the case for No. 10 is at the proven-and-notarised-and-certified-with-a-rubber-stamp stage. If Sir Keir promoted the rules, the Prime Minister wrote them. If Sir Keir had one party, the Prime Minister had eighteen. And so on.
I in no way say this to excuse the former. I even have some sympathy for the idea – which Fraser advances – that the lesson of all our arguing over the difference between planned and unplanned cake, or eating-while-working versus eating-while-chatting, is that some of the lockdown rules may have been a bit silly in the first place. Nevertheless, silly or not, they were the rules. Many people suffered for obeying them; and the people who promoted and especially the people who formulated them should have done so too.
So should ‘Beergate’ claim the scalp that No. 10 seems to be hoping it will, that would make the situation worse rather than better for No. 10. If Sir Keir falls on his sword, in any moral universe, the pointy end would poke right out through back of his Max Headroom-looking suit and gore the Prime Minister.
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