If Labour MPs have any sense, they will boot Starmer out before New Year, says Lord Hannan

Keir Starmer, knight of the forensic syllogism, has been ripped to shreds not by the usual suspects on the Tory benches, nor by the bearded YouTube Bolsheviks, but by that most unforgiving of forces: his own prior certainties.

He has spent years insisting that words matter, that speech has consequences, that standards must be enforced ruthlessly and without fear or favour. And then, with a flourish that would make even the most reckless world leader wince, he welcomed Abd El-Fattah with open arms, cameras rolling, moral halo firmly in place.

Cue the sound of crockery smashing.

The brilliant Lord Hannan, in a characteristically brisk and lucid intervention, hits the nail squarely, thunderously, on the head. The Abd El-Fattah case, once you sweep away the emotive confetti, is actually rather simple – if one is prepared to apply principles consistently, a habit Starmer has long demanded of others but now seems curiously unwilling to practise himself, then Starmer should admit defeat and accept that he has made an indefensible error. Or is he just too brazen to see what a hypocrite he truly is? I fear it’s the latter.

Let us establish some fundamentals. It should not be a crime… not here, not in a liberal democracy… to tweet that the British are “dogs and monkeys”, nor to announce that you “really really hate white people”. Such utterances are repellent, divisive and idiotic, but criminal? No. Free speech, like free markets, only works if it protects what we despise as well as what we applaud.

But, and this is where the Starmer problem metastasises, the government must apply the same standard across the board. If this is the rule, then it must also hold in cases such as Graham Linehan and Lucy Connolly. One cannot have a speech code that resembles a malfunctioning traffic light: green for one tribe, flashing amber for another, instant red for the politically inconvenient.

None of this is to suggest that such views are acceptable. They are not. They corrode social trust and poison civic life. Nor does opposition to the dictatorship in Egypt automatically confer sainthood. It is perfectly possible, indeed rather common, to be both an opponent of tyranny and an obnoxious extremist.

Still, as Lord Hannan rightly says, even obnoxious extremists deserve a fair trial. Abd El-Fattah did not get one in Egypt. On that, most fair-minded people can agree.

But here comes the bit that Starmer and his advisers appear to have vaulted clean over: none of the above makes Abd El-Fattah a desirable immigrant. The notion that Britain should not only admit him but lionise him, pose for photographs, offer warm words, polish the moral brass, is not noble. It is idiotic.

Mistakes happen. Heaven knows they happen in our creaking, Kafkaesque civil service. It is entirely plausible that nobody bothered to check Abd El-Fattah’s public statements before rolling out the red carpet. But, and this is the killer blow, Starmer has never allowed anyone else that excuse. Not ministers. Not officials. Not private citizens. He cannot now scuttle behind it like a man diving under the table when the bill arrives.

This is why the episode is so damaging. It does not merely reveal an error of judgment; it confirms what critics have long called the “Two-Tier Keir” problem. Call for the shooting of Israelis or white South Africans, boast of hating British colonialists, and you are elevated as a heroic victim of oppression. Insult immigrants or ethnic minorities, and the dock awaits. One law, two outcomes.

The issue will not go away. It will not be smothered by a reshuffle or buried beneath a well-timed foreign crisis. It will dog Starmer for the rest of his premiership, yapping at his heels every time he invokes fairness, equality before the law, or the sanctity of standards.

Lord Hannan’s conclusion is as cold as it is surgical: if Labour MPs have any sense of self-preservation, they will boot him out before the New Year. Whether they do so is another matter. But the damage is done.

In politics, hypocrisy is the one sin for which there is no absolution, and Keir Starmer, having built his career as the high priest of moral exactitude, now finds himself condemned by his own gospel.

He won’t last long.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street