So the great fraud unravels. When Keir Starmer presented himself for election, we had the vague impression that he was dull but straight. He might be a bit lawyerly and nit-picking, but he was going to govern this country with a puritan hostility to sleaze.
Look at him today, so deep in the trough as to be almost invisible. He is still wearing a very expensive pair of spectacles that were actually bought for him by a man who was later given a pass to No 10.
Accepting the spectacles was greed. Giving the donor a pass was corruption. Why is Starmer still wearing them?
He still swanks around in sleaze-funded suits. How can get away with it? Desperate to draw a line under the scandal, he says he is going to pay back some of the freebies.
He is writing out a cheque for £6,000 to cover the cost of some Taylor Swift tickets and other fripperies. But what about the specs, Keir? What about the tens of thousands of pounds worth of clothes that you and your family have apparently accepted from this same Lord Alli?
Look at him today, so deep in the trough as to be almost invisible. He still swanks around in sleaze-funded suits, writes BORIS JOHNSON
Why not cough up for the whole lot? What is the logic of this £6,000 refund? Where is it supposed to leave the rest of the freeboholic Labour front bench?
By their leader’s example, they should now be writing out giant cheques for all those football matches and opera tickets and whatever else they have taken. The whole thing is rank, and chaotic, and above all it is weak.
It was weak to take the spectacles, when the Labour leader is by no means poor; weak to allow some other chap to buy frocks for your wife; and pathetically weak to think you can end the scandal by writing a cheque for £6,000.
It is the sheer spinelessness of this Labour government that is now becoming truly frightening. Look at the complete disaster in the Indian Ocean, where Labour has suddenly given up UK sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, an archipelago that has been British since 1814. It is a total unforced error, a pointless emasculation of this country.
It means that the clock is now ticking for Diego Garcia, the giant air base that has been of such huge strategic value to both the US and the UK. We have agreed to give it up in 99 years – the twinkling of an eye, if you think like Beijing. Worse still, it means that all the other islands in the Chagos archipelago are now available to be military bases for – you guessed it – the Chinese.
Why did Starmer do it? What was the point of handing this crucial national asset to Mauritius?
When I was Foreign Secretary, and later when I was PM, I had a couple of conversations with the Mauritians in which I patiently explained to them that their claim to the islands was completely without merit. Look at the map.
The clock is now ticking for Diego Garcia, the giant air base that has been of such huge strategic value to both the US and the UK
Mauritius is 1,300 miles from the Chagos islands. There is no earthly reason why they should have sovereignty over Diego Garcia. Why have we so pathetically handed them over?
I will tell you why – because our country is now run by people who despise the legacy and memory of the British Empire, and who fundamentally want it disposed of – as fast as possible. They look at all our overseas territories, and they shudder with embarrassment.
They think that in any global territorial dispute, Britain is likely to be in the wrong. Indeed, they are sometimes lavishly paid – like Starmer’s buddy Philippe Sands, another Leftie lawyer – to prove that Britain is in the wrong.
I am afraid they are abetted by a few Foreign Office types who think – dementedly – that by publicly mutilating ourselves we can win the approval of the rest of the world. They think that by surrendering our old possessions, we can soften post-imperial resentments, and win ‘influence’.
I must tell you that these people are out of their tiny minds. We don’t win influence by displaying such weakness. We earn contempt.
What do they think, in Beijing, when they see Starmer pointlessly surrendering the Chagos Islands? They are laughing their pants off. Would they do the same? Not on your nelly. They are acquiring new bases around the world – not limp-wristedly handing over their rightful possessions.
For the first time in decades I am now genuinely anxious about Britain overseas, from Gibraltar to the Falkland Islands.
This is what happens when you are governed not by Blairites – as they pretended to be at the election – but by Leftie ideologues, people who secretly or openly hate such vital concepts as US hegemony, ‘Western values’, Nato and an independent British nuclear deterrent.
This week Starmer declared that he stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Israelis as they came under a massive ballistic onslaught from Tehran. Really? Shoulder to shoulder?
This is the same Starmer who cravenly capitulated to the Lefties in his party only a few weeks ago and imposed an arms embargo on the only democracy in the Middle East – at a time when Israel is under existential threat. Shoulder to shoulder? It would be laughable if it were not so nauseating.
Shoulder to shoulder with Hamas and Hezbollah, more like. The world can see this weakness, driven by Leftie ideology, and it is sapping confidence in this country abroad.
There was a time when the UK was seen as the leading European proponent and supporter of a free Ukraine: not under Starmer, I am afraid.
Perhaps worst of all is the systematic Labour weakening of Britain’s new-found constitutional independence. For Labour Lefties like Starmer, the EU is the ultimate progressive project – the total burying of outdated old parliamentary sovereignty, the gradual erosion of nationhood itself.
So it is no wonder that contrary to all their promises, they are trying to drag us back into the orbit of the EU; back into the magnetic pull of the EU legal order, even if we have no say in making the laws.
This week Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, announced that she does not mind if the UK is a ‘rule taker’ on such matters as chemical standards, and of course that will be just the beginning.
Rule taker. Savour those words. What does it mean to be a ‘rule taker’? It means you are a vassal state, a colony.
There you have the result of Starmer’s mad Left-wing agenda: bonelessly to surrender Britain’s former colonies, and turn this country into a colony of Brussels.
If we had been a rule taker during the pandemic, we would never have licensed the vaccines as fast as we did; we would never have delivered the fastest vaccine roll-out in Europe.
Starmer’s fraud – far more insidious than the fraud of pretending that Waheed Alli’s flat was his own – has been to wrap himself continuously, in every photo, in the Union Flag. He gave the nation the impression that he was going to stand up for Britain.
The tragic reality is that his Left-wing ideology is now weakening this country, at home and abroad. The sooner we Tories find a new leader, and take the fight to these champagne-quaffing Labour surrenderists, the better for Britain.
