It would be absurd for Starmer to resign over a curry

It will, of course, be irresistibly funny if Sir Keir Starmer has to resign, as he promised last night, because of being issued with a fine by police for breaching the Covid lockdown. It will be even funnier if Boris Johnson who, for all his other faults, has been far less sententious, nevertheless stays. Politicians might at last learn the ancient truth that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

However, I must resist my base desire for such a punishment and stick to the important point. In the great scheme of things, the Starmer incident is trivial. Think about it dispassionately. It is preposterous that the Leader of the Opposition should resign if, having eaten a takeaway curry, he did not return to work afterwards and therefore broke the rules. Even if he gave a rather misleading account of the occasion, it would be ridiculous for him to go. It just does not matter nearly enough. No one was harmed in the eating of Sir Keir’s curry.

The further we move away from the Covid crisis, the clearer it becomes that these temporary rules were hard to follow. Besides, they were not properly tested in courts because – probably wrongly – the police were empowered to issue on-the-spot fines.

If police investigations, without the protection of the accused by due process, can now force elected leaders out of office, we are bestowing on the police powers they should not have. Sir Keir should not be putting his future in their hands. We are accidentally laying the foundations of a police state.

I therefore repeat this column’s call for an amnesty for all those accused of petty Covid offences, even the self-righteous Sir Keir.

Sticking the word “-gate” on to any  scandal which crops up (“beergate” in Sir Keir’s case, “partygate”, “plebgate” etc) is rightly criticised for being lazy and boring, but the more serious objection is that it breaks impartiality in reporting. In the Watergate scandal, from which the suffix derives, the break-in and the cover-up did happen. But when we announce various “-gates” nowadays, we do so before they have been proved. We imply guilt and thus bias the reader or viewer. Tim Davie of the BBC should give a lead by banning the usage in all reporting.

On Saturday, I found myself 

combining the subjects of God and Mammon. It was the 40th anniversary of the magnificent Romney Marsh Churches Trust, first announced, via this paper, in 1982.

We were gathered in the handsome church of New Romney, by the Kent coast. The entertainment was a conversation between the former governor of the Bank of England (from 2003-13), Mervyn King, and me.

Partly because of the role of the Church in this regard, Lord King talked about the importance of institutions. He sees them as the vital third ingredient between the state on the one hand and the individual on the other, the way human beings – unlike other species – can collectively achieve great things by the power of a shared idea.

Given his own experience, he concentrated on our central bank, the oldest in the world. He described how the Bank of England, when made independent 25 years ago this month, had been charged with a single main purpose – to maintain price stability, holding the annual rate of inflation at two per cent. Because this aim is simple (though not easy) and visibly important, and because the Bank was under good stewardship, the institution won a high level of public trust. The famous “promise to pay the bearer” which appears on our banknotes recovered its meaning.

In recent years, this has markedly diminished. Though avoiding “personalities”, Lord King made the general argument that an institution loses its way when it departs from its basic purpose. Even when he was Governor, he said, some on the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee came up with ideas which might be “good for the economy”. So they might be, he told them, but that is the job of elected politicians, not us: we at the Bank must stick to our specific duty.

After Lord King left, his successors veered off-piste. Mark Carney (this is me, not Lord King, talking here) took it upon himself to support the Remain campaign in the EU referendum. He also – this Lord King did criticise – tried to make the Bank help stop climate change. Nowadays, it devotes much energy to apologising for slavery, judging the 18th century, as Lord King put it, by the standards of our own times. Eyes went off the ball. Now we have inflation at 7 per cent, and rising.

Just occasionally, a swear-word becomes a rallying cry. Early in the war in Ukraine, when border guards on Snake Island were invited to surrender to the Russian flagship Moskva, one of them, Roman Grybov, shouted out, “Russian ship, go f--yourself!” The phrase was immortalised on banners, postage stamps and tattoos. About six weeks later, Ukraine sank the Moskva. Grybov, originally presumed dead, had in fact been captured. By the end of March, he was returned home in a prisoner exchange. He has now put out a little interview which also features his tearful, but happy, mother: “As the phrase lifted the people’s spirits a little, my mother supported it. Although it is not a very nice thing to say, I am an adult, so I am allowed.” He had wanted to give the Russians “a decent rebuff ”, he adds. Decent it wasn’t, justified it was.