Tulip Siddiq’s resignation was long overdue, but Starmer will now struggle to virtue-signal like he did last summer
Daily Telegraph 14/01/25
Tulip Siddiq has left the Government. In other news, the Pope remains Catholic, and bears are using woods as their personal lavatories.
Choosing a corruption minister with transparency troubles as to her links with her aunt Sheikh Hasina’s ousted Bangladesh regime was a novel approach by Keir Starmer to refute suggestions his appointments lacked experience of their briefs. But even if she has not breached the ministerial code, she was doomed from the moment she was placed under an ethics investigation.
Under her aunt’s rule in Bangladesh, economic mismanagement and extra judicial killings were married to rampant corruption, with the equivalent of $150 billion thought to have been smuggled out of the country. After the fall of Hasina’s government in a mass uprising last year, Bangladesh’s new leaders were unsurprisingly keen to see if they can get some of that back.
There’s no truth in any suggestion that Starmer appointed Siddiq to oversee financial sector corruption on the assumption she might be a poacher turned gamekeeper. But as soon as Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission named Siddiq in an investigation into dodgy infrastructure deals, her position looked ludicrous, even before reports of gifted flats and family visits to Vladimir Putin.
That Tulip mania had not been a bigger news story is only down to Labour being assailed on all fronts. From the bond markets to rape gang survivors, no one has a good word for Starmer. Any hope that he had of painting his premiership as a departure from the perma-scandal of the Tory years is now shot. I would condemn Starmer’s poor political judgement, but I’m not sure he has any.
Yet Kemi Badenoch should hold off on toasting Siddiq’s scalp too loudly. After fourteen years of facing the media’s never-ending game of “Get the Minister”, seeing Labour hoist by the same petard is undoubtedly satisfying for us Conservatives. But Siddiq’s departure gives to voters the impression that Labour are just the same as us. That only redounds to the benefit of Nigel Farage.
Few will pay attention to the ministerial code’s intricacies. The NHS’s ongoing collapse, our porous borders, and miserably stagnant living standards are all much more immediate grievances – just as they were under the Conservatives. But coming so soon after Starmer sacking his Transport Secretary for having plead guilty to lying that her phone had been stolen and Lord Alli’s summer of sleaze, Labour look decidedly sordid.
Like the inhabitants of Manor Farm at the end of George Orwell’s fairy story, voters will look from Labour to the Tories, from the Tories to Labour, and from Labour to Tories again, and conclude it is already impossible to tell which is which. In that case, why not take a punt on Reform? And if the polls are to be believed, that is exactly what they are doing.
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