Remainer peer tipped off pals about Cummings trip
‘She’d grab any chance to bring him down’
AN ANTI-BREXIT Labour peer who was one of Tony Blair’s closest allies passed on information to help expose Dominic Cummings’s alleged breach of the virus lockdown, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Former Durham MP Hilary Armstrong is being feted by Labour colleagues for her role in revealing the No10 aide travelled 260 miles from his London home to stay near his parents in the North East of England.
Baroness Armstrong, a fierce opponent of Brexit, received ‘well done on Cummings’ plaudits last week from fellow Labour peers delighted at the embarrassment caused to the man many of them blame for delivering the 2016 EU referendum result.
Sources revealed that Lady Armstrong, who in 2017 claimed that the UK’s exit path was ‘mad and dangerous’, received reports about six weeks ago that Mr Cummings was in the Durham area.
The former Durham North-West MP then passed on the ‘tipoff’ to Labour peers and to an MP. A source said: ‘Hilary has very good contacts in the region. She heard from a colleague in the North East that Cummings had been seen in Durham.
‘She passed the tip on to other peers and to an MP.
‘Hilary didn’t ring the papers about it herself – she got somebody else to do that.’
The allegations against Mr Cummings were first revealed last weekend in the Labourfriendly Guardian and Daily Mirror papers.
At a private meeting of Labour peers via Zoom last week, Lady Armstrong sought to play down her role in the affair, claiming she was ‘getting too much credit for it’. But she is understood to have expressed regret that no photographic evidence existed of Mr
Cummings in the region or of a controversial trip during his stay to Barnard Castle.
One source said: ‘Hilary said, “It’s a pity that people in the North unlike down South aren’t so used to taking pictures with their phones.”’ One Tory MP said that ‘as a former key member of Labour’s North-East mafia and a Remainer to her fingertips, Hilary would have grabbed at any chance to take Dominic Cummings down.’
However, Lady Armstrong denied being motivated by Remainer revenge, saying she simply ‘could not believe that he [Mr Cummings] would have put public safety in jeopardy’ in this way. She added: ‘There were rumours going around in Durham about Mr Cummings being there and I passed that on.’
Last year, the arch-Blairite, who became a peer in 2010, was expelled by her local North West Durham constituency party after she put her name to a newspaper advertisement attacking then party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of antiSemitism allegations.
She hit back by voicing her sadness that the party in the constituency – at the time represented by Corbynite MP Laura Pidcock – ‘always used to be a place where differing opinions were respected’.
The former Labour stronghold was one of the so-called ‘Red Wall’ seats that fell to the Tories at last year’s Election.