A few months back, when he was chasing your vote, Sir Keir Starmer stood at a lectern, rolled up his sleeves and promised that Labour would ‘clean up politics’ and ‘restore standards in public life with a total crackdown on cronyism’.
It was a time when his power-hungry party was investing significant political capital in the war on what he invariably dubbed ‘Tory sleaze’.
Prime Minister’s Questions might see Sir Keir jab a finger across the Despatch Box to accuse the Conservative government of giving ‘kickbacks’ to donors, or enriching political supporters by signing off what he once called ‘dodgy contracts, jobs for their mates and cash for access’.
The calculated line of attack, endlessly amplified by Starmer’s front-bench allies and their stenographers in the Left-wing media, was designed to convince voters that the ‘nasty party’ had snouts in the trough.
‘We will stamp out Tory sleaze that has polluted our politics and corrupted our democracy,’