Starmer’s beergate troubles won’t get Boris off the hook

It looks on the face of things as if Sir Keir Starmer is coming unstuck over that blurry photograph of him with beer in hand after a day campaigning in Durham during lockdown.

His claim that no rules were breached on that occasion – like the earlier claims that Angela Rayner wasn’t there and that the curry was a spontaneous, ambushed-by-a-curry type of curry rather than a planned, party type of curry – is looking shakier than Shakin’ Stevens with the DTs. Beergate, thanks to new revelations in the Mail On Sunday, seems to have legs. But where do those legs, I wonder, take us?

Let’s suppose that everything that Sir Keir’s detractors say is true. Let’s not minimise the offence. Let us say that he did, in fact, order and consume a chicken korma and an indeterminate number of bhajis with icy premeditation, and that afterwards he told a stinking pack of inadvertently misspokes about it.