Ministers today lashed Keir Starmer’s ‘rank double-standards’ as a secret Labour Party document appeared to shatter his version of events over ‘Beergate’.
Deputy PM Dominic Raab said the Labour leader’s hypocrisy ‘drives people crazy’ after an operational note for his notorious visit to Durham suggested late-night drinks and a curry with activists was planned in advance.
The bombshell document seen by the Mail on Sunday – marked ‘private and confidential’ – also cast serious doubt Sir Keir’s claim that he returned to work afterwards.
After the entry recording the ‘dinner in Miners Hall’ – which includes a note to ‘arrange takeaway from Spice Lounge’, a local curry house – the document simply says: ‘End of visit.’
Shadow Levelling Up Secretary Lisa Nandy risked upping the stakes dramatically for Sir Keir this morning, as he faces a full-blown investigation by Durham Police. She pointed out the Labour leader is a former Director of Public Prosecutions. ‘He is Mr Rules,’ she told Sky News. ‘He doesn’t break the rules.’
Ms Nandy insisted that she ‘won’t entertain’ the idea that Sir Keir could be fined and forced to quit – after he said Boris Johnson must quit over his own Partygate penalty.
Asked if Sir Keir should quit, Mr Raab told Sky News: ‘It’s the rank double standards that drive people crazy.
‘He needs to fess up and answer all of the holes in the account that he gave for that beer-and-curry event in Durham.’
He added: ‘Keir Starmer looks like, I’m afraid, someone who is engaged in complete hypocrisy, complete double standards and I don’t think he is going to get past that until he gives a proper account of what happened in Durham.’
There are claims a witness present at the gathering in Durham on April 30 last year is ready to tell police the event did indeed break rules at the time.
Referencing the meet-up with Durham MP Mary Foy and her staff, the source told the Sunday Times the group ‘were not working and I have not got a problem telling that to the police.
‘They were just getting p****d. They were just there for a jolly. It’s not something that I am prepared to defend.’
The revelations are understood to have further piqued the interest of the force, with a police source adding: ‘It raises the question about what else we might not have been told the entire truth about.’
There is now growing discontent within the party, with senior cabinet figures privately acknowledging the issue has become a frustration that could drag on for weeks, according to the Observer.
Diane Abbott, meanwhile, became the first Labour MP to suggest the leader should step down from the role if – like Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak – he is fined for breaching the rules.
She told LBC: ‘I’m a loyal supporter of Keir Starmer. I’m just making the common sense point that if he gets a fixed penalty notice he should consider his position.’
The memo – which was passed to the Mail on Sunday by a whistleblower – also further undermines Labour’s claims that it made ‘an honest mistake’ when it denied that Deputy Leader Angela Rayner was at the event: it lists ‘AR’ alongside ‘KS’ as the two senior politicians anchoring the day’s proceedings.
The Labour leader – who is also under pressure from party members over his failure to make a significant UK-wide breakthrough in last week’s local elections – is facing accusations of hypocrisy, having called for Boris Johnson’s resignation in January when Scotland Yard launched its inquiry into claims of No 10 lockdown-breaking.
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries said last night: ‘Being investigated or receiving a fixed-penalty notice is not a resigning matter for anyone at all – unless of course you’ve daily argued the case that it is just that and repeatedly called for the resignation of others. He’s bang to rights and has no choice but to resign thanks to his own sanctimonious hypocrisy.’
Labour has tried to draw a distinction between ‘Beergate’ and ‘Partygate’ on the grounds that Sir Keir’s event was not premeditated: when Sir Keir’s transport spokeswoman Louise Haigh was asked by the BBC’s Fiona Bruce on Thursday how the beer and curry evening was different to a gathering in Downing Street, she said: ‘There was a big difference… he [Keir] broke to eat, and then carried on working afterwards.
‘The various parties in Downing Street were pre-arranged, social events.’
But the note – a forward-planning logistics document which is referred to as an ‘op note’ – makes clear the beer and curry night had been planned in advance.
The note says that after a day’s campaigning in Hartlepool, Sir Keir’s team were due to arrive at the Radisson Blu hotel in Durham at 6.31pm, leaving by 7pm to walk to the Miners Hall.
After recording clips for the media, the note says a 1hr 20mins slot was set aside for ‘dinner in Miners Hall with Mary Foy’, the local Durham MP. A side note reads: ‘YS to arrange takeaway from Spice Lounge’. YS is the acronym for a member of Sir Keir’s private office.
The Spice Lounge curry house was closed at the time, with callers being referred to the nearby Capital Indian restaurant. Last week, the Daily Mail spoke to one of the restaurant’s delivery drivers, who said he had dropped off a ‘big’ order of food for at least 15 people, including four bags of curries, rice and naan bread.
Sir Keir has insisted the curries were eaten during a break in work. When asked whether he had returned to work after the beer, the Labour leader said: ‘Yes. And the idea that nobody works at 10 o’clock at night is absurd.’
But the memo sets out that at the end of the dinner, at 10pm, he should ‘walk from Miners Hall to Radisson Blu’. Further work is not mentioned.
When he was quizzed on ITV’s Good Morning Britain programme last week, Sir Keir said: ‘At some point, this was in the evening, everybody’s hungry and then that takeaway was ordered. It was then delivered into the kitchen.
‘Restaurants and pubs were closed, so takeaways were really the only way you could eat. So this was brought in and at various points people went through the kitchen, got a plate, had some food to eat and got on with their work.’
However, The Mail on Sunday has established that the Radisson Blu was serving food when Sir Keir and his party checked in at 6.31pm and continued to do so until 9pm.
At the time, lockdown laws allowed staff to meet indoors if doing so was ‘reasonably necessary for work’, but ‘there should not be any sharing of food and drink by staff who do not share a household. Minimise self-serving options for food and drink’.
In addition, Government guidance put in place for the following month’s local elections stated: ‘You should not meet with other campaigners indoors. Only rarely will two people be required indoors at the same location to manage bulk delivery handling.
‘You should keep these interactions to a minimum to reduce contact and follow the guidance on how to stop the spread of coronavirus at all times…’
The document also refers to four members of the ‘MPL’ – Met Police Liaison – who were included in the trip, suggesting they are likely to have information useful to the investigation.
Also included on the op note is the line ‘Covid Alert Level: National Lockdown’, and ‘important note: please maintain social distancing of 2m and wear face coverings whilst indoors at all time’.
The leaked document makes clear that Ms Rayner was to play a central role in the day’s events.
The party has admitted to not telling the truth about Ms Rayner’s presence.
When the Mail asked the party on January 14 whether she had taken part in the event, it said: ‘Angela wasn’t there.’ But when confronted last month with video evidence, Labour admitted: ‘Angela was present’, and said previous denials had been ‘an honest mistake’.
A Labour spokesman said: ‘Keir was working, a takeaway was made available in the kitchen, and he ate between work demands. No rules were broken.’
A party source added: ‘During a fast-moving campaign, the op note doesn’t always keep up with events so it would be wrong to assume that activities occurred at the times originally planned. For example, it’s been documented that the takeaway was late.’