Coincidental as it may be, a pattern has emerged when it comes to what Sir Keir Starmer does and doesn’t know about the organisations he is heading.
As director of public prosecutions, he always seemed to be kept in the dark whenever his senior staff were handling a particularly hot potato.
Sir Keir was never told about investigations into Jimmy Savile or Mohamed Fayed, for example. New evidence that came to light about Andrew Malkinson, wrongly convicted of rape, “never crossed his desk”, we are told.
He was “not aware” that the Crown Prosecution Service was wrongly prosecuting postmasters under his watch.
Now it turns out that his knack for being ignorant of important information has followed him into politics.
When Louise Haigh was appointed by him as Transport Secretary, she did not disclose the full truth about her previous criminal conviction, Downing Street sources have said.
Once again, Sir Keir is telling us that he can’t be blamed for what happens within an organisation he heads – in this case, the Government – because he wasn’t provided with crucial information.
It begs the question, though, of whether he is at the very least guilty of being incurious. With his deep knowledge of the law, would it not have been pertinent to ask a series of questions of Ms Haigh when she told him about her conviction?
If she had made a “genuine mistake” when she told police that her work phone had been stolen during a mugging, why – if her account of the incident is true – did she decide to follow her solicitor’s advice not to comment during a police interview? And why did she plead guilty to a criminal offence?
Multiple sources have now claimed that Ms Haigh was accused of at least one other work-related matter when she was at Aviva from 2012 until 2015. Did Sir Keir ask her if the fraud conviction was an isolated incident before he put her in charge of a £30 billion government department?
He might feel he has been let down by the people around him failing to give him the information he needs, or he may argue that he cannot know what everyone in a large organisation such as the CPS or the Government is up to.
But there is a second element to the pattern of his career – Sir Keir as the hero of the hour whenever there is a triumph to be claimed.
According to his official biography on the Labour Party website, he is the man who oversaw the first ever UK prosecution of al-Qaeda terrorists, secured the successful retrial of terrorists involved in a suicide bombing plot, prosecuted MPs for fiddling their expenses, and brought the killers of Stephen Lawrence to justice.
Lest there be any doubt about his ability to get involved in case work or remember things that happened years ago, Sir Keir said this week that, when it came to assisted dying, he “looked at every single case for five years that was ever investigated”.
As Oscar Wilde might have said, to be unaware of one scandal brewing under one’s nose might be regarded as misfortune, but to be unaware of several starts to look like carelessness.
