Keir Starmer has let slip the truth about his plan to abolish the Lords

Can a political leader keep getting exposed for conveying obvious untruths and yet be judged a fit person to occupy 10 Downing Street or even just a seat in the House of Commons? That’s been the theme of a week at Westminster which has seen Boris Johnson excoriated as someone not fit even to hold a pass giving him access to the Parliamentary Estate as a former MP. So it is odd then that almost nobody has commented on Keir Starmer’s exposure for the commission of a new political fraud – even though it came in the high-profile setting of PMQs.

While lambasting Rishi Sunak for permitting Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list to go through, Starmer argued that the result would be that:

‘Those who spent their time helping to cover up Johnson’s lawbreaking are rewarded by becoming lawmakers for the rest of their lives.’

But how can this be so given that Starmer himself claimed as recently as December that he is committed to abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with an elected second chamber, as envisaged by the report of Gordon Brown’s constitutional commission? He told Sky News that he wanted to get the reform done in a first term ‘because when I asked Gordon Brown to set up the commission to do this, I said what I want is recommendations that are capable of being implemented in the first term’.