Keir Starmer has more questions to answer over lockdown, and No10 cannot stonewall forever, says Tom Harwood

Now, at a NATO Press Conference this week, Keir Starmer somehow had time for just two questions from the press before dashing off. As journalists shouted questions about his apparent breach of lockdown rules, the Prime Minister managed to mutter “of course not”, adding “all rules were followed” as he ran from the room.

But were all rules followed? Leonie Mellinger posted a selfie visiting Keir Starmer in London on 24th December 2020, when the strictest lockdown rules were in place in the capital. Mellinger claims that her 60 mile journey to meet with Starmer was exempt as she qualified for “key worker” status.

Tom Harwood says Keir Starmer has to face the music

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But Starmer’s forensic team have failed to produce a single document proving this to be the case. Voice coaches or indeed actresses were on no list of key workers during that strictest tier of Lockdown on 24 December 2020.

And the truth here matters for Starmer. During a previous police investigation, he said that were he found to have broken any Covid rules, he would resign.
Now, to understand the potency of this latest scandal we have to put it in context.

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Starmer has denied breaking lockdown rules

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Let’s think back to the height of Boris Johnson’s PartyGate, when – in April 2022 – Keir Starmer addressed the scandal in Parliament.

Now, this was the first exchange between the then Prime Minister and Keir Starmer since Boris Johnson received his fixed penalty notice over a gathering in the Cabinet room – all to mark his 56th birthday. Let’s put aside the fact this was a surprise gathering put on by civil servants, we’ll get to that later.

Keir Starmer in his 2022 Commons statement tried to draw a parallel between Boris Johnson’s cabinet room gathering, and the real world – that’s where he raised case of John Robinson.

John didn’t see his wife in hospital as she died of Covid. He followed the rules. Close family members couldn’t even attend the funeral. They followed the rules. John would have given the world to have held his wife’s hand. But he didn’t. John followed the rules.

Keir Starmer explained that John would have given the world to hold his wife’s hand, even for nine minutes.

Why nine minutes? This nine minutes refers to the time Boris Johnson spent in the Cabinet Room on 19 June 2020. The event for which both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were handed fixed penalty notices.

The point that Keir Starmer was trying to make was that it didn’t matter it was for a short period of time. It didn’t matter that the June Cabinet Room gathering was with people who were all in Downing Street for legitimate work purposes. Starmer’s point was that the brief birthday celebration was against the rules. And it was the rules that mattered.

Starmer’s commons performance that April was quite the performance. I remember sitting up there in the House of Commons press gallery looking down at the exchange and thinking wow. He’s really gone for the jugular. No context necessary, the simple devastating and emotional line that John Robinson could not hold his dying wife’s hand and Boris Johnson had an illegal gathering.

Yes, hardly a party. Could he look less like he actually wanted to be there? Let’s look at the context of this so called party, the only gathering for which the Prie Minister and then Chancellor Rishi Sunak received a fixed penalty notice.

Of course, many restrictions were being lifted by 19 June 2020, the date of the cabinet room gathering. Boris Johnson had just returned from a re-opened school that very morning. Lockdown was beginning to be lifted with schools returning, the introduction of the Rule of Six, and the end of the official stay at home order from the beginning of the month, nineteen days prior.

Notably, the idea of the Prime Minister briefly celebrating his birthday with the colleagues he would have met anyway was deemed so uncontroversial, so asinine that it was printed in the pages of The Times newspaper the next morning.

“Boris Johnson celebrated his 56th birthday yesterday with a small gathering in the cabinet room. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, and a group of aides sang him Happy Birthday before they tucked into a Union Jack cake. The celebrations provided a brief respite after another gruelling week” wrote The Times.

No10 cannot stonewall forever, Tom Harwood said

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Of course this was before the collective hysteria of PartyGate made such a report scandalous a year and a half later.

Perhaps this was so uncontroversial because the rules on 19 June 2020 were far more lax than the rules on 24 December 2020.

Yes by 24 December, when Keir Starmer’s voice coach travelled sixty miles to London to give him acting lessons, London was in the midst of Lockdown’s strictest tier. There were no exemptions for non-key workers. The country was hurtling towards 1000 deaths a day. Keir Starmer himself called it an emergency.

The Leader of the Opposition was urging people to follow the rules. The strict rules. He highlighted the emergency the country faced. Keir Starmer would later opine before the House of Commons how people like John Robinson were prevented from even holding the hand of their dying relatives.

Yet now we know Keir Starmer met up with his voice coach. In person. During the strictest tier of lockdown.

Number 10 are refusing to comment. The Prime Minister’s political aides say no rules were broken. But no one has been able to point to where the roles of actress or voice coach fitted into the official list of key workers. The limited list of people who were able to go about their business even during the strictest lockdowns.
Nurses, doctors, emergency responders. Paramedics, policemen, firemen … And voice coaches?

It’s clear that Leonie Mellinger did not think of herself as being allowed to train people’s communication skills in person during the height of the pandemic, as is revealed in her linkedin post of July 2021 – spotted by Christian Calgie of the Daily Express – noting that it was only in July 2021 that Mellinger had gone back to in-person coaching, six months after helping Keir Starmer in person during the Christmas Lockdown of 2020.

It’s clear that there are more questions for Keir Starmer to answer here. And Number 10 can’t stonewall forever.