Keir Starmer dramatically pledged to quit if he is fined for breaking lockdown rules, as Labour prepared to present police with a dossier of evidence to show his team worked beyond 1am on the night he was pictured drinking a beer.
The Guardian can reveal that Labour has compiled time-stamped logs of WhatsApp chats, documents and video edits – which it will provide to the investigation by Durham police.
The party claims it proves the curry and beers shared between his team came as part of a long working day preparing for the Hartlepool byelection, meaning it was permitted under Covid rules at the time.
In a speech on Monday after hours of deliberating with his aides, Starmer took the gamble of his career by saying he would resign if police issued him with a fixed-penalty notice for what happened on April 30 last year. His deputy, Angela Rayner, who was also at Durham Miners Hall, also said she would resign if penalised.
Starmer said he was determined to prove he had “different principles to the prime minister”, who has already been given a fixed-penalty notice for breaching lockdown rules in Downing Street.
He said he was confident he had not broken the rules but would resign if fined, saying: “The British public deserve politicians who think the rules apply to them.”
Detectives investigating the circumstances of the takeaway curry are considering interviewing the Labour leader face to face, the Guardian understands. Durham’s police’s investigation is set to carry on at least until June, and any of the at least 15 people present could face a penalty if deemed to have broken laws by detectives.
Starmer is said to be confident he will not be fined because of the evidence that the takeaway was part of his working day, though a leaked memo showed the order was pre-planned at the end of a Zoom quiz organised by the local MP.
In messages seen by the Guardian, at least two senior aides who were present at Durham Miners Hall sent queries about script edits and video editing between 10.30pm and 1am after the takeaway was ordered for the campaign team, which included Starmer, Rayner and the Labour MP Mary Foy.
Labour sources said they would insist Starmer had not broken the rules regardless of whether work continued after the meal – but said the evidence added weight to Starmer’s case and gave them the confidence he would not have to resign.
A party source said: “We have been totally clear that no rules were broken. We will provide documentary evidence that people were working before and after stopping to have food.”
Starmer and his team will provide police with evidence from WhatsApp groups, including one set up for the visit, where tweets, scripts and video edits were being discussed until the early hours.
In a speech on Monday, Starmer said he had “simply had something to eat whilst working late in the evening, as any politician would do days before an election.”
Not all participants in the WhatsApp group were at the hall – and Starmer is not a member of either group – but one message the following day says, “Keir woke up this morning with some queries about the video.” A source said Starmer was given overnight briefing papers to work through for the following day’s visit.
The Labour leader filmed a video in the hall with timestamps on the video showing filming took place until 9.07pm – and WhatsApp messages then show aides corresponding about the edits.
In a message at 10.52pm, an aide says they are “only just editing” a message for International Workers’ Day and warns they “won’t have something through for an hour or two”. They also say a script for Starmer’s visit to Liberty Steel in Hartlepool still needs to be completed.
Labour will also show police edits made to a Google document containing a script for a clip that Starmer would film at Liberty Steel, which show changes being made from 10.41pm until 11.19pm.
One WhatsApp message with the final edit – from an aide who was with Starmer – sends the final edit at 1.56am with the message “Sorry it’s so late”. The messages do not make it clear whether aides remained in the venue until that time or whether they returned to work at their hotel.
Starmer’s decision to announce he would resign if the police found he had broken the rules was criticised by some Conservative MPs as putting unnecessary pressure on Durham police. The minister Chris Philp suggested Stamer could be “attempting to pressure the police into clearing him”, describing the move as “deeply inappropriate”.
Tory MPs had previously been warned by whips to stop short of calling for Starmer’s resignation because of the pressure it could put on Johnson.
Starmer said it had been entirely his decision, as rumours circulated among Labour MPs that he had faced calls to make the declaration from members of his shadow cabinet. “This is my decision about what is the right thing to do in these circumstances,” he said.
“This is about me. It’s about what I believe in in politics. It’s about integrity, and I believe in integrity, and integrity requires me to take the course of action I have set out if, in the event, I get a fixed-penalty notice.”
Earlier on Monday Starmer pulled out of a speech at the Institute for Government as he wrestled with how to respond to the renewed pressure on him over the conduct at the gathering in Durham of Labour aides, some of whom were reported to have been drunk – which was denied by Foy.
Starmer has a loophole where he could potentially be criticised by the police but not fined – an approach the Durham force took after an inquiry into alleged lockdown breaches by Dominic Cummings, who was then the prime minister’s senior aide.
Answering questions from the media, Starmer indicated that he would not necessarily step down if police did not fine him yet said the event may have breached rules.
“The penalty for a Covid breach is a fixed-penalty notice,” he said when asked about that situation. “That’s a matter of law. And I’ve set out what the position is in relation to that.”
