Tears on his pilau

Curry has featured before in a Labour leadership crisis. In 2006, plotters seeking to replace Tony Blair with Gordon Brown met in a Wolverhampton Balti house to discuss tactics. They failed to dislodge the prime minister but he agreed to a timetable for his departure. A few years later, Labour Cabinet ministers chose a south London restaurant to try to stage a coup against Mr Brown, thinking (rightly) that he was going to lose the election.

Now it is Sir Keir Starmer’s turn to be undone by a curry. His insistence for weeks that a gathering involving himself and party officials in Durham during the pandemic lockdown was a “work event” has been unravelling faster than a snagged cardigan. His problem is that the justification for the meeting, which involved a beer and curry order for some 20 people, is the same as Boris Johnson’s, namely that officials and aides who had been together all day met up for some sustenance. The fact that this was not allowed under the pandemic rules is testament to how absurd they were.

Sir Keir’s contention is no different and if the Met police found some of the No 10 gatherings in breach of the law, it is hard to see how Durham police can interpret the same law differently.

They tried to resist investigating and, indeed, this was a matter best left to the politicians and not subject to a police inquiry. But once the Met began to look into it, Sir Keir mounted a high moral horse and demanded Mr Johnson’s resignation, even before any fines were issued. It is hard to see how he now extricates himself from the quandary he is in without being exposed as a hypocrite or resigning himself. From cake to curry, the idiocy of the lockdown rules is now exposed for all to see.