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Students of newspaper hyperbole will be reading with admiration today the Daily Mail’s “damning six-page dossier” about Labour and lockdown breaches. For obvious reasons, the Conservatives are keen to suggest that Boris Johnson was not the only senior politician to have broken Covid rules (although he is the only one to have been fined by the police) and today the Mail has gone in all guns blazing with a report implying Keir Starmer’s attacks on Boris Johnson over Partygate have been hypocritical.
The main story focuses on the incident where Starmer was photographed drinking beer in an office with Labour staffers when they were campaigning in the run-up to the Hartlepool byelection in April 2021. Starmer says they were just having a meal break, the Durham police has said no Covid rules were broken.
Keir Starmer was in the workplace, meeting a local MP in her constituency office and participating in an online Labour party event. They paused for food as the meeting was during the evening. No rules were broken.
There is simply no comparison between standing in a kitchen having something to eat between meetings, with multiple, flagrant rule-breaking drinks parties at the heart of government, dismissed by lies at the despatch box and resulting in an apology to the Queen.
There is little credibility in any argument that the UK government either did not anticipate the implications of what it had agreed, or was constrained and unable to choose any other option.
The facts and choices had been spelt out clearly over the whole period from 2016 onwards and the detail of the provisions (notably most of the applicable EU law contained in annex 2 to the protocol) were known at latest in autumn 2018.
