We all have generous aunties, right? My own once let me live rent-free in her London flat for several months while I was teenaged, and broke, and working as a slave for Auberon Waugh’s Literary Review magazine. I can’t count the number of family dinners in the years since where I’ve had second helpings pressed on me at her groaning table. Aunts are often like that. So in the post-Christmas period, when many of us even now have extremities toasty warm from the socks and mittens left by such aunties under the tree, it is in a spirit of charity and understanding that we should approach the case of Tulip Siddiq, Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate, and economic secretary to the Treasury, a job which includes special responsibility for corruption, money-laundering and dodgy finance of all stripes.
Siddiq’s aunty is Sheikh Hasina, former prime minister of Bangladesh
Siddiq’s aunty is Sheikh Hasina, former prime minister of Bangladesh. As well as benefiting from their generosity, there’s no question many people, rightly or wrongly, sometimes find their aunties kind of embarrassing. Mine, for instance, wears brightly-coloured spectacles and talks about her sex life in public a bit more than I or her grown-up children would ideally like her to. Siddiq’s fled into exile after a popular uprising in Bangladesh. Her regime stands accused of election tampering, political violence, extrajudicial killings and ‘rampant corruption’ – including the illegal transfer of more than £100 billion overseas. The new government in Dhaka accuses her (and Hasina denies such claims) of ‘massacres, killings and crimes against humanity’ – which is, admittedly, the sort of thing that the governments of developing countries will tend to say about their predecessors. For all I know, she’s a jolly nice old doll.
It’s her niceness, rather than any alleged moments of severity, that has been attracting unwelcome scrutiny. It was reported this weekend that, in 2009, one of Hasina’s political allies gave Siddiq’s sister what looks to be a freebie flat in Hampstead in which Tulip lived for a bit. On Friday, it was reported that another individual linked to her aunt’s political regime gave Tulip herself a free flat round the corner in King’s Cross in 2004 (a spokesman for Siddiq said the property was in no way linked to support for the Awami League, Hasina’s party). Tulip and her family don’t live there, though: they’re currently billeted, paying what they say are market rates, in a £2 million semi in Finchley owned by an official in the London arm of the Awami League. (The Siddiqs do own a flat of their own in Cricklewood, bought with their own money, by the way: last year Tulip apologised to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards for the ‘administrative oversight’ that prevented her declaring that she was renting it out, having hoofed it to that des res in Finchley.) Meanwhile, Tulip’s mum is in a Golders Green house owned through an offshore trust by the son of another of Sheikh Hasina’s billionaire political advisors (it is not known if she is renting).
Tulip’s mother and sister previously lived in another Hampstead flat owned by an executive member of the same Bangladeshi political party who was, hard luck on him, arrested after the fall of the regime (he denies the charges against him).
Tulip, incidentally, has blown hot and cold on her ties to her aunt’s regime. She declared herself ‘ecstatic’ when, in 2008, her aunt became prime minister, she joined the Awami League’s official delegation to the UN in 2011 and called herself part of their ‘UK and EU lobbying unit’. In 2013 – and who hasn’t made this sort of whoopsie? – she travelled to Moscow in a private capacity to catch up with Aunty Hasina and ended up posing for photos with Vladimir Putin. A Labour spokesman said the Putin-Hasina ‘dealings’ ‘have absolutely nothing to do with her’.
When she took her own seat in 2015 she told the Awami League she couldn’t have done it without them. These days she has recused herself as an MP from matters concerning Bangladesh and says she doesn’t talk about politics to her aunt.
Anyway, there are certain small-minded people who are insinuating that all this is a bit rum. Instead of seeing an aunt’s innocent love for her sister and her nieces, and wish to do the best for them, echoed in the feelings of several of her multimillionaire political associates, they wonder where all this money has come from, and ask cui bono, and suchlike. They even have the cheek to suggest that it might not be seemly for a British politician whose specific brief is anti-corruption to appear to be benefiting from thousands of pounds worth of largesse from the scions of a deposed and discredited foreign regime and its allies.
Well, I can’t see it myself. And nor can Tulip’s friend and patron Sir Keir Starmer, who declares that she still enjoys his full confidence. Good on him. As Our Lord nearly said: let he whose family hasn’t been accommodated over the years in a multi-million-pound web of north London property owned or donated by associates of a Bangladeshi political party throw the first stone.
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