Well I don’t know about you, but I definitely heard a nasty slur flung from one leader to another during the parliamentary debate on the Sue Gray report. Not Boris Johnson’s claim that Keir Starmer had failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile while he was Director of Public Prosecutions. That was merely a pathetic, unbecoming, unwise and unfair insult thrown from a position of weakness and unattractive impetuosity. No, the insult that had me taking a sharp intake of breath was one made moments earlier by Starmer towards Johnson. It ran as follows:
‘Just as he has done throughout his life, he has damaged everyone and everything around him along the way.’
This was Starmer seeking to eviscerate the Prime Minister’s character by bringing his famously complicated private life and his conduct in general before politics into the fray. The implication was that Johnson had damaged his own previous wives and grown-up children by his grotesquely selfish behaviour; that the man was what used to be described in polite company as an ‘S H, one T’.
I can’t have been the only one to notice the highly personal nature of Starmer’s attack
There was no calibration in Starmer’s remarks either.
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