There are moments in politics when the mask slips, when the careful choreography gives way to something far more revealing, and this is unmistakably one of them.
What we are witnessing under Keir Starmer is not the steady hand of a principled reformer, nor the forensic mind so breathlessly advertised, but something altogether smaller, thinner, and, frankly, more cynical.
Let us call it what it is.
A Prime Minister so politically brittle, so evidently unsure of the strength of his own position, that he must lean on his MPs, cajole them, pressure them, and implicitly threaten them with political oblivion, simply to avoid the mild inconvenience of scrutiny by the Privileges Committee. Not a war, not a national emergency, but an inquiry, an inquiry into whether he told the truth.
And that, we are supposed to accept, is leadership.
It is not leadership, it is evasion, managerial evasiveness dressed up in constitutional costume. It is the behaviour of a man who talks endlessly about integrity while treating accountability like an optional clause in a contract he never intended to honour. The spectacle is embarrassing, a government so eager to proclaim its virtue, yet so desperate to avoid testing it.
Contrast that, if you will, with Boris Johnson, a man of altogether different mettle. Flawed, perhaps, we all are. Larger than life, unquestionably. But crucially, when the storm broke, he did not skulk behind procedural manoeuvres or strong-arm his colleagues into shielding him. He faced the music. He volunteered himself to go before the committee. He made his case in full view of the public, with that unmistakable mix of defiance and conviction, prepared to stake his reputation on it.
And that is the difference.
Johnson, for all his critics, operated with a kind of bullish openness, a belief, undeniably sincere, that he could argue his way through the fire because he had nothing to hide. I went through the evidence at the time, in detail, not casually, not second-hand, but line by line, and I remain convinced he was entirely innocent of the caricature that was constructed around him. Looking at a birthday cake presented to him on his birthday, in his place of work, was not a party. It was, at most, a fleeting moment in a working day that was later inflated beyond all proportion.
And yet, what followed bears all the hallmarks of something far less pure than the official narrative suggests. The involvement of Sue Gray, a senior figure overseeing the very civil service culture under scrutiny, later stepping seamlessly into a senior role alongside Starmer, leaves a lingering sense of a process that was, at the very least, compromised in appearance. The now-infamous scenes, civil servants singing, glasses clinking, karaoke echoing through Whitehall corridors, all under her watch, sit awkwardly beside the image of a Prime Minister briefly acknowledging a cake between meetings. Yet it was Boris who was cast as the central villain, hung out to dry like a kipper in what many would recognise as a deeply questionable stitch-up.
Starmer, by comparison, seems almost allergic to the same test. Instead of embracing scrutiny, he manoeuvres to avoid it before it can even begin. Instead of trusting his MPs to exercise independent judgment, he corrals them like a risk-averse middle manager desperate to keep a fragile project from collapsing under inspection.
And the irony, the almost theatrical irony, is that this is the very man who built so much of his political persona on lecturing others about standards, about honesty, about the sanctity of Parliament. The man who, from the despatch box, demanded that Boris be hauled over the coals for every perceived misstep now shrinks from the same process as though it were an administrative inconvenience.
It is not merely hypocrisy, though there is plenty of that. It is a kind of smallness, a narrowing of ambition from grand promises of renewal to the grubby mechanics of survival. The language of principle has been replaced by the tactics of preservation. And history, when it comes to weigh the detail, has a habit of being far less forgiving than the whips’ office. History will not be kind to Starmer.
And what of the MPs, those unfortunate foot soldiers? Many of them, elected on shifting sands and the peculiar arithmetic of a split “right” voting opposition, now find themselves in a position where their careers depend not on their judgment, but on their obedience. Vote the right way, or face the consequences. Fall in line, or be cast out.
That is not parliamentary democracy. That is party control edging into something far less comfortable. The UK Parliament was never intended to function as a mere extension of the whips’ office, still less as a shield to protect a Prime Minister from legitimate inquiry.
Meanwhile, the shadow of Boris lingers over the whole affair… as a reminder of what political courage, or at least political audacity, looks like. He did not strong-arm a majority to avoid scrutiny. He walked into it. He took it head-on. And whatever one thinks of the process that followed, there is something undeniably more direct, more robust, about that approach than the careful ducking and weaving we see now.
Because in the end, this is not just about one vote, or one committee, or one Prime Minister’s discomfort. It is about whether those in power believe they should be subject to the same rules they so readily apply to others.
On the evidence before us, Starmer does not appear to believe that at all. And no amount of carefully worded statements, or tightly whipped votes, can disguise the simple truth, that when faced with scrutiny, he chose not to rise to it, but to run from it.
Claire Bullivant
