It’s day two of Labour conference and Sir Keir Starmer’s freebie fiasco still hasn’t gone away. Over a week since it transpired that clothing donations to Lady Starmer hadn’t initially been declared properly, revelations that the Prime Minister has received over £107,000 in donations since 2019 have caused outrage among the party’s voter base – and its own MPs. Corbynista Diane Abbott slammed the party’s top team for being ‘in the pocket of millionaires’, while Labour parliamentarians have blasted Starmer’s ‘double standards’ over the issue. Talk about trouble in paradise…
But not everyone believes the matter deserves media attention. At a Labour conference fringe event today, Sir Keir’s own biographer – the man who revealed Starmer had removed the Iron Lady’s portrait from the former No. 10 study – took umbrage at journalists covering the story. Blasting the press coverage the whole palaver has received, Tom Baldwin fumed that:
Support for Labour under this government is a bit shallow, a bit tepid. And I think there is a problem here already. We’ve seen it in the last few weeks with some hyperbolic reporting trying to draw false equivalence between millions of pounds of Covid contracts handed out to their cronies and their mates, and £5,000 of dresses so that it could look good in a general election. And that’s being professional.
Ed Miliband’s former comms director didn’t stop there. Going on, Baldwin raged:
Some journalists are going around doing victory rolls at the moment. Well, it’s not Woodward and Bernstein. It’s not conversations in an underground car park. They read the register of members interests because guess what? They registered it and they follow the rules. And some of the journalists should really look at themselves in the mirror. Because they’re in danger of, you know, some of them want to make all politicians look the same, as a political strategy. Others just think it’s a bit of fun. And that’s what is dragging politics down.
Ouch. Talk about pulling no punches, eh? Starmer’s biographer had strict words for Labour leakers too, adding:
Presumably there are Labour advisers who think they are serving the interests of this government – they are picking up the phone and briefing journalists. I mean, if you can’t distinguish between office politics and politics, you shouldn’t be in the latter.
Oo er. The gloves are certainly coming off. If Sir Keir is looking for another spinner, Mr S knows just the man for the job…
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