Keir Starmer – 2021 Comments on “Conservative Sleaze”

The comments made by Keir Starmer, the Leader of the Labour Party, on 15 November 2021.

We need to call time on the Tory sleaze scandal that has engulfed Boris Johnson’s government.

While the Prime Minister has failed to act, Labour is taking the lead by giving MPs the chance to end the sort of dodgy lobbying that Owen Paterson was guilty of. It should be a point of consensus that paid directorships and commercial consultancies are not jobs for MPs. The only people MPs should be lobbying for is their constituents.

The Prime Minister has admitted the Paterson motion ‘could have been handled better’; Wednesday is a chance to show he means it.

Boris Johnson should call on his MPs to do the right thing and vote to publish the Randox papers, end dodgy lobbying and show that standards in public life still matter.

It was the Prime Minister’s decisions which has led to this scandal. He has repeatedly failed in his leadership over this issue. Boris Johnson now has a choice: support Labour’s plan to fix this or whip his MPs to vote against a ban on dodgy second jobs for MPs and a cover-up on the Owen Paterson scandal.