Daily Mail

What kind of socialist dips his hand in the goody bag as it passes while depriving poor pensioners of their winter fuel allowance?

The desperatel­y moving testimony of a highly educated woman in Afghanista­n — speaking on strict condition of anonymity

SIR Keir Starmer presents himself to the British people as honest and straightfo­rward. A man of rectitude, who served as Director of Public Prosecutio­ns.

In 2021 he called the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, ‘Major Sleaze’, and claimed that his administra­tion was ‘mired in sleaze, cronyism and scandal’. This was a charge repeated numerous times in various forms by Sir Keir.

Now he himself is open to the accusation of cronyism and sleaze. He has certainly caused a scandal, though many in the British media seem remarkably relaxed about what he has done.

Outrage

We already knew that this year a multi-millionair­e Labour peer called Lord Alli has given £18,685 worth of clothes and several pairs of glasses to the Prime Minister. We also knew that the same Lord Alli obtained a No 10 security pass and used it to entertain Labour donors in the garden of Downing Street.

A new bombshell has now landed, thanks to the Sunday Times. Sir Keir has breached parliament­ary rules by failing to declare that Lord Alli has recently bought expensive clothes for Lady Starmer, reported elsewhere to amount to some £5,000.

Imagine the response if Boris Johnson had been guilty of such behaviour. There would have been an explosion of wrath. Labour MPs would have been welcomed into broadcasti­ng studios to denounce him. And yet, as I say, there has been little outrage in Starmer’s case.

This story breaks down into two parts. Why does a rich man, reckoned to be in the top one per cent of earners, need a multi-millionair­e to buy his clothes? And was the failure to inform the parliament­ary authoritie­s that Lady Starmer had accepted free clothes an oversight or a deliberate act of concealmen­t?

Let’s take the first part first. It is utterly bewilderin­g that a man on £166,786 a year, whose wife is thought to earn an annual salary of £50,000 as an NHS occupation­al health worker, should need someone else to pay for his or her clothes.

His reliance on rich donors goes beyond Lord Alli. The Financial Times has reported that, between the 2019 general election and July 1 this year, Starmer declared £76,000 worth of clothes, entertainm­ent and other free items from donors.

By most standards, he’s a wealthy man, owning a house in North-West London thought to be worth about £2million (though it may be partly mortgaged) and unburdened by private school fees because his two children go to state schools. His income in the 2022-23 tax year was a whopping £404,000.

I submit that if a man of such riches can’t clothe himself out of his own pocket, and turns instead to rich donors, he may be justifiabl­y accused of greed or stinginess – or very possibly both.

Not only that. Starmer has recently reiterated that he sees himself as a socialist. How will many Labour voters, getting by on a fraction of the Prime Minister’s income, regard his partial dependence on hugely rich donors when he enjoys a standard of life far beyond their dreams?

If he were poor – for example like Keir Hardie, Labour’s first leader, whose Christian name his parents bestowed on him – no one would complain. But he’s rich – and yet he dips his hand into the goody bag as it passes.

Many will also be disconcert­ed, and some appalled, that a privileged person calling himself a socialist can deprive poor pensioners of their winter fuel allowance, and be contemplat­ing tax raids (disavowed during the election campaign) on people much less well-off than he is.

It doesn’t smell right, does it? Nor does Starmer’s failure to inform the parliament­ary authoritie­s that his wife has also been on the receiving end of Lord Alli’s largesse. And yet, incredibly, Sir Keir was entirely unapologet­ic yesterday, and suggested he would continue to accept freebies from the multi-millionair­e.

The Prime Minister may have relied on others to disclose these gifts, and they may have let him down. But it was his responsibi­lity to ensure that the authoritie­s were informed. One would expect no less from the man of rectitude he purports to be.

The suspicion lingers that this wasn’t a mere oversight, and that someone in No10 wanted to hide the donation to Lady Starmer, at any rate for a while, because disclosure was thought likely to cause the Prime Minister embarrassm­ent following revelation­s about earlier gifts from Lord Alli.

Sir Keir isn’t the honest politician he pretends to be. Let me quote from a prescient Mail leader column published on September 25, 2009. It had emerged that Starmer, recently appointed Director of Public Prosecutio­ns, had omitted his education at the selective Reigate Grammar School in his Who’s Who entry.

Dishonest

The leader suggested that ‘despite the fact that the school almost certainly made him the man he is, it didn’t fit with his image as a man of the people’. Then came the killer question: ‘Those who utter small lies invariably tell big ones as well. Don’t such small acts of deception tell us something significan­t about these public figures?’

That is precisely the point. Sir Keir Starmer may have prosecuted criminals in the name of the Crown, but he is in my view one of the most dishonest politician­s of recent times – far more so than Boris Johnson, whom he chastised from a moral high ground he had no right to claim.

Speaking of Boris, it’s true that he accepted a large donation for fancy wallpaper and other items in No10, but at least that was intended to embellish a national asset – rather than Boris himself, who sometimes looks as though he buys his clothes in an Oxfam shop.

Back to Sir Keir. His huge leaps of policy in a short space of time can’t be justified by the right to change one’s mind. He has given new meaning to the word ‘zigzag’. One moment he presents himself as a man of the ‘soft Left’, the next he is a paid-up Corbynite, supporting wealth taxes and other extreme measures.

In 2020 he stood as Jeremy Corbyn’s successor as Labour Party leader, promising a smorgasbor­d of Left-wing policies including the abolition of university tuition fees, the nationalis­ing of privatised industries and the soaking of the better-off. He subsequent­ly abandoned most of his pledges and repackaged himself as the moderate who was on show during the election campaign.

Fractious

Once in power, he has lurched back in the direction from which he came, planning tax increases that were cynically concealed in the campaign, and allowing his deputy, Angela Rayner, full rein to extend trade union rights that, when implemente­d, are likely to take us back to the fractious 1970s.

I believe that the British people – remember that only about 20 per cent of the electorate voted Labour – are quickly cottoning on to Sir Keir’s shape-shifting nature. His personal poll ratings are plummeting. Has any newly installed prime minister ever been barracked as Starmer was at Doncaster races over the weekend?

It took years for the Tories to become tarred with sleaze. Sir Keir has managed it in a matter of weeks.

This unedifying story of donations that the Prime Minister should never have accepted, and the apparent concealmen­t of gifts to his wife, betray an inherent moral slipperine­ss. How long will it be before it defines the whole Government?

EVEN from many metres away in the crowded passageway of my local bazaar I could hear the voices of the Taliban.

Clad in their traditiona­l robes and wielding automatic weapons, they were pulling people aside and questionin­g their business there, one of the arbitrary spot checks aimed at rooting out those who dare to break their oppressive rules.

I was accompanie­d by my brother – my ‘mahram’, or guardian – for single women like me are unable even to shop for groceries without a male chaperone. As Taliban rules also demand, I was covered from head to toe in my burka despite the stifling 30c heat.

Nonetheles­s, I still nudged my brother and gestured with a nod to him that we should quickly return home – the only way I could communicat­e with him, as a new law introduced last month has banned women from speaking in public.

For encounteri­ng the Taliban is not worth the risk: however much you think you have complied with their evermore stifling demands, they find ways to brutalise you. We know of a woman who was sent to prison, and her husband tortured, because when they were stopped and questioned about what they had for lunch that day they gave different answers.

Even buying medicine for your sick child is no armour against their cruelty. Desperate for medicine for her sick son, a widowed friend was ‘caught’ at the bazaar alone. She was given a draconian fine, and told that next time she would be physically punished.

THIS is the reality of life in Afghanista­n in 2024. A world where women have lost all their basic human rights and freedoms since the Taliban took control three years ago.

We are banned from schools, offices, public baths, parks and gyms. When we dare to step outside the confines of our homes, there must not be a single bit of our body or face visible apart from our eyes – through a mesh covering – and we must be accompanie­d by our husband or a male family member.

Reduced to nothing more than domestic chattels, we find the boundaries of our lives shrunken to the four walls of our family home. Banned from looking directly at men we are not related to by blood or marriage, we have now even been robbed of the one thing left to us – our voice.

As the new law tells us: ‘Whenever an adult woman leaves her home out of necessity, she is obliged to conceal her voice, face and body.’

Those who do disobey risk being fined if they are ‘lucky’ – and flogged or jailed if they aren’t. It is why the internet is the only way left for us to communicat­e. The predominan­t emotion among Afghan women young and old is fear and despair.

The older generation weep for their daughters, who in turn see no hope for the future after being abandoned by Western democracie­s which have stood by while everything has been taken from us. This is why I am speaking out, although I must disguise my story, as anyone who dares to exposes the reality of life under the Taliban regime will feel the full weight of their punishment. Earlier this year, the spies managed to track down a woman who gave an anonymous interview to an American television network. She has since disappeare­d.

I can say I am a woman in her mid-twenties who, before the Taliban returned to power, had a happy life in my small city. I worked in IT, and my salary helped support my extended family. I still lived at home, and while I did not have a sweetheart, I hoped – even assumed – I would marry for love.

In the meantime, I enjoyed many of life’s simple pleasures: picnics in the park, meeting friends in cafes.

How could I have known how quickly these freedoms would be taken from us when the Taliban swept back again?

My mother knew: I remember her choking sobs as we huddled around our television set and watched their fighters riding through the streets of Kabul.

MY SISTER and I clung onto hope; over WhatsApp groups, we speculated feverishly that this time would be different. We thought perhaps just a few small things would change, that we could continue to work and go to school.

Not once did we think it would be even worse, and today I could weep at that astonishin­g naivety, for it took only weeks to realise that the Taliban’s intention was to slowly erase women, systemical­ly stripping them of their rights.

What they want of us is to stay home, cooking and cleaning for a husband who may have many wives, raising their children and obeying their every instructio­n.

Since the Taliban returned to power, they have issued nearly a hundred mandates restrictin­g our freedoms, banishing us from the workplace and education.

Last year, they ordered the closure of all beauty salons – one of the only remaining ways for women to earn an income. I know of a widow in another city who has no choice but to work surreptiti­ously in neighbour’s houses, leaving her home under cover of darkness.

She has no other way of feeding her five children, but lives in fear of being caught. ‘The torment is constant,’ she told me in a text message. ‘It is all I have, the anxiety of not knowing if we’ll have enough to eat tomorrow, or if my secret attempts to work will bring harm to my family.’

The financial consequenc­es of

women’s abolition from the workplace cannot be overstated.

In my home, only my brother is now able to work.

Without the income that I and my sister brought in, we have had to make a strict timetable to make every tiny bit of food last as long as possible.

Gone are the cakes and any other small luxuries. Now we exist on rice and other basics, and cannot eat every day.

In a country where there is a chronic shortage of food, all of us have become used to the feeling of an aching empty stomach.

EVEN men have found their livelihood­s affected. One of my friend’s husbands is a shopkeeper, but his income has plunged since the women who could once pop in while passing can now not enter his shop without a mahram, and must ask for goods by pointing rather than speaking.

The Taliban have visited him more than once to warn him that if they hear that a woman has come in alone they will close his shop.

Another friend who was at university and who dreamed of opening her own business has retrained as a midwife, the only ‘job’ left to women in Afghanista­n, although it pays very little.

She has no interest in the work, but told me that it at least allowed her to help her family, as well as leave the house and mingle with other women – although she must be careful: earlier this year three female health workers were detained because they were travelling to work without a male chaperone.

But then, the Taliban’s dreaded morality police are everywhere.

They conduct spot checks on our homes to make sure we are living under their laws, while random checkpoint­s spring up overnight.

If you answer questions the ‘wrong’ way, you can be sent to jail, and men who are considered to not have their women under control are tortured.

It takes so little to be a dissident, and anyone who once worked for the ‘infidels’, as any western business or agency is seen, remains a target.

A friend who once worked for a European NGO was told by a Taliban fighter that her disloyalty could only be compensate­d for by marrying him.

When she refused, her brother was brutally beaten at a Taliban checkpoint and she was run over by a car in the street, leaving her hospitalis­ed for a month. Terrified, she went into hiding until some contacts in the UK helped her and her family to escape.

Escape is not possible for most people though. Fathers must stand by as their daughters – some barely teenagers – are sold into marriage to older men who repulse them.

In the past few months I have seen it happen to two family friends, young girls both married to men they had never even set eyes on before they exchanged vows.

On her wedding night, one of them was beaten by her new husband because she had cried.

I know her father cried, too: her marriage was the price he paid for one less mouth to feed. For both girls, the best they can hope for is that their husbands do not tire of them.

Earlier this year, the Taliban also announced the reintroduc­tion of the public flogging and stoning of women for adultery, and they are only too aware that, as a man’s word is prized over that of any woman, they do not have to do anything wrong to find themselves cast out to their deaths.

One friend told me: ‘Even when I can go out with my husband, I do not want to. I feel frightened the moment I step out of my house.’

Is it any wonder we feel like caged birds? Our days rest heavy on us, trapped in our homes.

WE TRY to keep busy with domestic chores or reading – and even then only ‘approved’ books – but there are too many hours in the day.

Now that under the new rules our voices are also deemed to be instrument­s of vice, we cannot even speak freely indoors.

If a passing Taliban hears singing, or loud reading, this too is an offence. We must speak softly at all times, even when reciting the Quran.

It means the sound I hear most in my home is not laughter, or excited chatter, but soft crying, because we cannot see any way out.

Our only lifeline is our WhatsApp groups, although we are careful what we say, because we cannot be sure the Taliban’s spies are not monitoring them somehow.

I know that more than one teenage girl has tried to take her own life rather than face a future in which she has no hope.

It is the lack of hope that is hardest, in fact.

The West remained silent when they banned our education, silent as they took away all our other freedoms, too.

Now we have lost our voice, and again the West does not raise theirs. It means there is nothing left for us.

LIB Dems dashed from their hotel breakfasts – ‘I’ll stick to the prunes, Derek’ an ageing buffet-goer had said at the Holiday Inn – but not for the reason you might think.

The day’s first debate was on proportion­al representa­tion. For Lib Dems, 9am on a Monday doesn’t get more exciting than that. There was a slow-motion stampede for the conference hall, the halt and lame, wonkish and weird hobbling down the sea front, trousers flapping, walking sticks clacking like castanets as they hastened to the big event.

By the time I fought my way to the hall Christine Jardine, MP for Edinburgh West, was complainin­g that the worst thing about Britain was that ‘nobody quite understand­s the D’Hondt principle – except in this room perhaps’. That drew knowing clucks from the audience of electoral reform connoisseu­rs.

The D’Hondt method is a complicate­d system of dishing out parliament­ary seats. It is named after a 19th century Belgian mathematic­ian, Victor D’Hondt, who may have been the Carol Vorderman of Victorian Ghent.

Outside, sunbathers enjoyed a beautiful day, children ate ice creams and a middle-aged man with a Mohican hairdo was having a devil of a time with the seaside breezes. You can always spot punk-rockers from coastal towns. Their Mohawks bend at an angle like clifftop blackthorn bushes.

While all this cheerful life was happening by the beach, those of us inside the conference hall were being subjected to a tooth-grinding discussion about alternativ­e vote plus, single transferab­le votes and top-up components.

We heard that overseas voters should have their own MPs – imagine being the Hon Member for the Algarve – and that there should be another referendum on proportion­al representa­tion. Nick Clegg lost one in 2011 but Lib Dems do not let that stop them boring on about the issue.

SAME with Brexit. A former parliament­ary candidate disclosed that she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, so badly shaken was she by our leaving the EU. Every time she sees Nigel Farage on the television she presumably grabs a tin helmet and jumps into the nearest foxhole.

‘Instead of having one MP we should have two,’ suggested a Cheshire member.

A woman from Runnymede thought MPs should be called ‘local champions’. A chap from Enfield, bald head as flat as Table Mountain, cried that this debate on voting methods was ‘the most Lib Dem moment of my life’. Whereupon the MP for Hazel Grove, Lisa Smart, told them to ‘stop being such massive nerds’. She said it again. ‘Let’s stop being such nerds.’ Were they offended? Don’t be daft. They took it as a compliment.

TIM Farron, former party leader, arrived to conduct a review of the last election. ‘My name’s Tim,’ he said, faux modest.

A succession of local Lib Dem agents and organisers made mini speeches. They were Radio 4 to a tee: prosperous, pukka, white. In an earlier age they’d have been church wardens of the damper Anglican variety. Now they belong to the Church of Tim and Ed. Single-syllable Christian names an advantage.

There was fretting about the Greens, who have wiped out the Lib Dems in some city centres. Greens are younger, less wall-eyed, even more socialist. ‘We need to pivot now and oppose Labour,’ offered a poshie from Oxfordshir­e, but that found little favour. Lib Dems like Labour; but they are scared of those feral Greens.

Two possible future-leader pitches came from Layla Moran in the Gaza debate – she was a chilly as a bowl of gazpacho – and current deputy leader Daisy Cooper, who spoke about health, mainly her own. She disclosed that she nearly died from Crohn’s disease 12 years ago. The hall listened with sympatheti­c interest. Ms Cooper is today a picture of toothy fitness, exhausting­ly positive. She tried to work some outrage about the NHS into her speech but it did not fly. You can’t denounce opponents if you keep smiling. It was like being told off by a Pilates instructor.