Ex-chief urges police to revisit ‘beergate’
POLICE should reinvestigate allegations that Sir Keir Starmer broke lockdown rules, a former chief constable has said, as it emerged that detectives have still not asked to view the original “beergate” video.
Sir Peter Fahy, the former head of Greater Manchester Police, said Durham Constabulary should look again at the case in the light of “new information”.
Sir Peter’s comments risk derailing attempts by Sir Keir to put the row behind him as the Labour leader hopes to capitalise on a strong showing in today’s local elections.
Police are under pressure to investigate after Sir Keir was filmed drinking beer with colleagues last year, at a time when indoor social gatherings were banned under Covid regulations. Sir Keir was repeatedly pressed on the matter in a breakfast television interview yesterday. He said the gathering was permitted because it was a work event.
Sir Peter said much of the Covid legislation had been confusing for officers.
“I think they should probably just look at the new information and reconsider their situation … I think Durham do need to probably reconsider it.”
It came as The Daily Telegraph established that the person who made the video recording of Sir Keir had not been questioned by detectives or asked to hand over the original recording.
The individual who made the film on April 30 last year said: “I have not had any contact [from the police] yet.
“I thought it was pretty outrageous because at the time we were not allowed to have our friends over.”
After the PM’S trial by ordeal on Tuesday, it was Sir Keir Starmer’s turn to face the Spanish Inquisition of morning TV. Lockdown had been adhered to with a level of devotion and hypocrisy that the 15th-century Roman Catholic Church could only have dreamt of. If Good Morning Britain’s Susanna Reid was playing the Torquemada role today, her colleague, genial good-cop Richard Madeley, was probably closer to the inquisitor’s clerk.
The outcome was simultaneously surreal and incredibly boring – like a really low-stakes version of an auto-da-fé. There were outraged questions about long-ago-consumed food and drink, posed in minute detail. For the seventh day in a row, the Leader of the Opposition went back over old accusations, and peevishly deployed the same lines of defence as the Tories, with similar levels of success. It was as if the Labour leader – he who demanded the Chancellor resign for singing “Happy Birthday” to his boss – had been forced to inhabit the puritanical hell he’d helped create.
Everything began normally enough. Sir Keir, sitting a Putin’s-table length away from the inquisitors, couldn’t tell them whether Labour would reverse the National Insurance rise, and hotly denied they’d formed a pact with the Lib Dems. “We’re fighting a very positive case for the Labour Party at these local elections,” he said, attempting to beam cheerfully through this sentence, as politicians do when talking about anything positive. However, not being one of nature’s great smilers, the end result was something closer to a Wallace and Gromit grimace – a plastic grin that seemed almost welded to his cheeks.
Eventually, the inquisitors moved on to “beergate”. Madeley picked up his copy of the Daily Mail and cradled it in his arms, as if readying himself for attack. “We ALL obeyed the rules scrupulously, and I am furious on behalf of our viewers,” fumed Torquemada Reid, reading out a list of offences from the infamous night in question. “Beer and takeaway food. [A] work event that was not reasonable for work purposes.” “How do you plead?” she asked the accused. “I completely understand the emotion you’ve just described!” he said, betraying all the emotion of a traffic bollard.
Madeley upped the outrage, if anything, even further; describing a sea of curry, a positively Bacchanalian orgy of balti in Durham. “Thirty – THIRTY takeaway meals,” he gasped, “and bottles of beer… social intercourse that went on until about 10 o’clock at night.” What a den of vice and iniquity Inquisitor Madeley had uncovered.
Sir Keir, sadly, didn’t opt for the Bill Clinton defence – “I did not have social intercourse with that biryani.” Instead, he applied the arguments he and his party had crucified the Tories for using before – there were more important things to talk about, like the cost of living. “A takeaway was ordered,” he explained in the passive tense, as if he, too, had been ambushed, only by curry instead of a cake. He begged for pity in extremis. “In Durham, all restaurants were closed” (they weren’t). Will that line hold? Who knows. But for once the absurd game of lockdown moralism at least seemed like an equal opportunities event.