Remembering back to the Labour leadership hustings two years ago, Starmer of old proudly boasted of his willingness to shoulder the blame for the mistakes of his staff, and promised to always “carry the can” if he won. To be fair, that was the Sir Keir of 2020, who also wrote those ten leadership pledges which are now at the bottom of a dustbin somewhere in Labour HQ …
Now, having been found to have committed a whopping eight breaches of the MP Code of Conduct, things appear to have shifted. In his letters to Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Kathryn Stone, published last night, Sir Keir takes “full responsibility” for the breaches… only to then repeatedly remind Stone who’s really to blame:
“As I said in my letter on 13th June, these late declarations were as a result of an administrative error within my office […] I apologise for the delay in registering this declaration for these tickets but the person who gave the gift in kind was overseas and my office was trying to obtain the accurate details of the amount in order to declare it. This was an administrative oversight by my office…”
I take full responsibility, but…
