I am shocked, stunned, staggered; literally rocked to my foundations. Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party and former director of public prosecutions, actually arranged the Covid piss-ups in Downing Street without anyone knowing about it. Boris Johnson and his pals, including his then chancellor Brand Rishi Sunak, partied the days and nights away not because they actually wanted to smash the rules they had imposed on everyone else but because of what I assume must have been a sinister brand of hypnosis. Boris may be a dangerous narcissist and a compulsive liar but it was Keir what made him do it. At least that’s what the increasingly unhinged Daily Mail wants you to think.
For the Mail and various other loonies like ‘Mad’ Nadine Dorries and the MP for the 19th century Jacob Rees-Mogg, the idea that the former civil servant Sue Gray should take a job as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, after conducting an inquiry that proved that Johnson and co were on the lash, results that were accepted by the party-goers themselves, is too much to bear. Johnson himself is apparently “shocked and disgusted” that Ms Gray should dare take on another job after quitting the civil service merely proves she’s some Corbynite plotter who made up facts about his squalid behaviour.
To this mainstream Labour member and supporter, Gray’s appointment is a very good one for Starmer. She arrives not as a plotter and a schemer, but a woman with impeccable credentials and a highly successful public servant. We do not know if she was approached by Labour before she retired from her civil service career, but so what? It is hardly unusual to find someone who works for one employer and is approached by another with a view to seeking alternative employment. Given the Tories’ long history of sleaze and dodgy deals, the news about Ms Gray is of little interest to anyone except the Labour Party and those who want to make up stories, you know, like the Daily Mail.
Far more sinister is the potential role of our law-breaking prime minister Sunak, who admitted attending one of Johnson’s parties at a time when people were unable to visit their dying relatives in hospital. Sunak could block Gray’s appointment, something that would be a crass and cynical act and it would say far more about him and this dreadful government than it would about her.
My feeling is that Starmer has chosen the person he believes to be the best person for the job, which is the very opposite of Boris Johnson whose appointments were often of cronies and back-slapping wrong ‘uns, like the ludicrous Ms Dorries.
As for the Mail, one can only conclude that it believes its entire readership to be idiots who will believe any old bollocks put in front of them. I wouldn’t quite go that far but the reality is that people – very few of them these days, actually – buy newspapers which suit their views. In which case some 800,000 people are buying into an absolute lie. Doubtless, these will be the very same people who think the moon landings never happened and the world is run by a secret cabal of lizards. It would hardly be a leap of faith, would it?
