Sunday 8 May 2022 02:26 AM MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT: Party leaders should clash over big issues, not cake ... trends now
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Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, is in the sort of trouble such a person really ought to know how to avoid.
After many weeks of denouncing the Prime Minister for supposed lockdown misdemeanours, he finds himself daily more deeply mired in suggestions that his own behaviour during the Covid regime was less than perfect. Such a person really should not now be under investigation by the police.
But this trouble is entirely of his own making. He has spent ages digging this pit, so that he could fall into it.
Sir Keir presumably knows that he has not been a very convincing leader of the Labour Party, or of the Opposition.
He has tried hard to distance himself from his disastrous predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, yet cannot escape the fact that he willingly served in Mr Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet.
Civilised politics is damaged when leaders resort to personal attacks on their opposite numbers as a substitute for debate or criticism (file photo of PMQs)
In two years in his position he has not landed a glove on the Government. During the Covid crisis his ‘opposition’ was nothing of the kind. It consisted mainly of demanding more of what the Government was already doing, rather than the riskier but more responsible course of questioning policies that, on occasion, were certainly at fault.
Sir Keir has, in fact, not managed to persuade the nation that he offers an alternative either to the worst
