Keir Starmer has ruled out ever producing a resignation honours list, as he urged Rishi Sunak to “show leadership” by attending and voting in Monday’s debate about the report that found Boris Johnson had misled parliament.
Speaking in Edinburgh on Monday morning before a speech on energy, the Labour leader accused the UK prime minister of weakness for waving through Johnson’s long and increasingly controversial resignation honours list.
Among those on the list were two people who attended a party held by London Conservatives during lockdown in December 2020, which is being reinvestigated by police after footage emerged of staff drinking alcohol and dancing.
The party was organised by the campaign team of the unsuccessful London mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey, who was made a peer by Boris Johnson in his recent resignation honours list. Bailey had left the gathering before the video was filmed.
The Tory aide Ben Mallett, awarded an OBE on the list, is seen in the video.
Asked by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme whether he would hand out resignation honours, Starmer said: “No. There are other opportunities.”
He added: “Tony Blair didn’t have a resignation list. It’s very hard to justify … There are other avenues for that and I think it’s easier to be clean about this and simply say, no, I wouldn’t do it.”
Starmer said he did not believe there was a way to rescind the awards to Bailey and Mallett: “I’m not sure there is. I certainly don’t think they should be getting honours. And I think that the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, should have said no. But he didn’t – he waved it through.”
He did, however, say he would intervene as prime minister if he objected to resignation honours nominated by Sunak.
“Yes,” he replied. “I think what Rishi Sunak did was wrong. Everybody knew the privileges committee was about to report on the behaviour of the former prime minister.
“Why on earth didn’t Rishi Sunak take the provisional list of Boris Johnson and say, ‘Thank you very much, I will put that on one side, and I’ll come to it and look at it when I know the findings of the privileges committee … If, for example, the privileges committee says you lied to parliament, then I’m not going to put your list through.’”
Speaking earlier to BBC One’s Breakfast programme, Starmer said he would return to parliament in time for the debate and vote on the privileges committee report, which found Johnson repeatedly misled MPs, and called on Sunak to also attend.
“I want to see the prime minister there when I arrive back in parliament, because he has to show leadership,” he said. “What his predecessor got up to was unacceptable. The prime minister wants to lead. So he has to come to parliament and vote in this debate this afternoon to show where he stands on this issue.”
Many Conservative MPs and ministers are either expected to stay away from the debate, or else not push it to a vote, amid competing pressures to distance themselves from Johnson’s behaviour but not anger Johnson supporters among Tory members.
Speaking on Sunday, the levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, said he would abstain as he believed the committee’s recommendation that Johnson be suspended for 90 days was “not merited”.
The suspension is moot because Johnson resigned from parliament after learning the recommended punishment. However, the vote will ask MPs to endorse whether he should be barred from having the parliamentary pass normally given to former MPs.
