MAN WHO JUST CAN’T ANSWER A STRAIGHT QUESTION
Amid claims protection officers may have witnessed beer event, Starmer repeatedly dodges key issues in squirming interviews
Keir Starmer was left squirming yesterday as he struggled to fend off urgent questions over ‘Beergate’.
During a series of bruising interviews, the Labour leader refused three times to say whether police have been in touch with him following fresh revelations in the Daily Mail.
Sir Keir also snapped angrily at a journalist who questioned whether he had really gone back to work after his 10pm beer and curry with his deputy Angela Rayner and party officials.
Labour’s defence hangs on the unsubstantiated claim that he had carried on with campaigning duties
KEIR Starmer faced yet more questions over ‘Beergate’ last night after it emerged his own police bodyguards may have witnessed the alleged lockdown breach.
Students who filmed the Labour leader drinking in the office of one of his MPs while indoor socialising was banned also photographed an unfamiliar black Land Rover Discovery parked outside.
If it was one of the official police protection vehicles issued to Sir Keir in his role as a senior politician, it would raise the prospect that officers guarding him can help definitively solve the questions which continue to swirl around the night’s events.
One of the students who filmed the gathering at Durham Miners Hall on April 30 last year said: ‘We had never seen a black Land Rover parked there before, it really stuck out. We took a picture of it because we were conon vinced it was the car in which he had been driven there.’ Last night a Metropolitan Police spokesman said: ‘We do not comment on protection matters.’ Labour did not respond to requests for comment.
Former Scotland Yard Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick was previously forced to defend officers on duty in Whitehall as questions were raised on how potentially lockdown-breaching gatherings were able to take place at a site with a heavy police presence.
Speaking in February, she said the officers were there to provide ‘protective security’ but refused to be drawn ‘anything they may have seen or heard’. The Leader of the Opposition is one of a small number of senior politicians given round-the-clock protection by police.
Specialist officers and patrol cars are provided by a special committee of the Metropolitan Police which offers the same protection to senior royals.
Officers would know everywhere the ‘principal’ is going during a visit and have a rough idea of timings, a source said last night.
There are typically two cars from a pool of vehicles, one for the VIP with a driver who is usually a police officer, plus a backup vehicle containing further officers. All are typically armed.
It came after police in Durham last night failed to back up Labour claims that officers had not contacted Sir Keir about claims of a beer-swigging lockdown breach.
even before the suggestion that the Labour leader’s bodyguards were present that night, the force has been under intense pressure to rethink its decision not to investigate whether the Labour leader broke the rules.
But almost nine hours after Sir Keir gave an interview to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme – during which he repeatedly failed to deny whether police had been in touch with him or his office over ‘Beergate’ – it finally confirmed it was making no statement to clear up the confusion.
Durham Constabulary also said there was no update on its announcement last week that officers were going to ‘consider’ Conservative MP Richard Holden’s demand that it investigated the much-scrutinised events of that night.
‘Questions continue to swirl’