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Good morning. “Seriously though, why is Tulip Siddiq still in her job?” That’s the question you kept asking last week as the FT revealed a series of stories about her family and her connections to them, all of which seem like a poor fit given the nature of her ministerial role.
Some thoughts on that in today’s note.
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Haigh now
Tulip Siddiq, anti-corruption Treasury minister, has thus far weathered a series of stories that look to be considerably bigger than the one that led to the resignation of Louise Haigh.
My colleagues revealed that a man secretly detained for eight years by the regime of Siddiq’s aunt and former Bangladeshi ruler Sheikh Hasina said Dhaka police raided his family home after British journalists asked Siddiq about his plight. This alone raises more serious questions than a lost phone. In November, Haigh was forced to resign after admitting she had pleaded guilty to a criminal offence over a missing mobile phone.
Last week, Siddiq referred herself to the government’s adviser on ministerial standards after an FT investigation found she was given a two-bedroom flat in London’s King’s Cross in the early 2000s by a person with links to the Awami League.
Why is she still in her post? Part of the answer is about proximity to the prime minister. Siddiq, like Haigh, is someone from the party’s middle or “soft left” who “lent” a nomination to Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 and helped accidentally power Corbyn to the Labour leadership, with all the consequences that had.
But unlike Haigh, a Sheffield MP who backed Lisa Nandy for the Labour party leadership, Siddiq is a power player within the London party. As the MP for Hampstead and Highgate, she is Keir Starmer’s constituency neighbour. Siddiq backed him for the leadership very early in the contest. Although the prime minister has shown ruthlessness when required in shedding or demoting his allies, he has also shielded them whenever he has been able to and retained them in his government. Another aspect is that the Awami League is one of Labour’s sister parties, and has campaigned for Labour here in the UK. “Siddiq’s family are the Kennedys of Bangladeshi politics,” as one Labour official puts it.
And the third reason is that, thus far, the opposition has not made it remotely painful for Starmer to retain his friend and ally in government. Kemi Badenoch called for the prime minister to sack Siddiq late on Saturday night, but both she and the shadow Treasury team have been slow to run with the story. (I’m not going to revisit all the arguments I made last week as to why it would have been better to focus on the Siddiq affair than that of grooming gangs, where the opposition front bench was visibly not across the detail. This all remains the case.) Now that the main opposition party has woken up to the story, it may be that Siddiq’s days as a Treasury minister are numbered.
Now try this
All I knew about the new Jacques Audiard film Emilia Pérez before going to see it is that it was made by one of my favourite filmmakers and starred Zoe Saldaña. I don’t know what I was expecting, but “a tragic opera in which the lawyer played by Saldaña is recruited by a cartel boss who wishes to become a woman” was not even in my top 100 guesses. Nonetheless I enjoyed it in a sort of “this is completely mad and wildly incoherent” way. Danny Leigh, I think, just thought it was completely mad and wildly incoherent.
