In Matthew Doyle, Keir Starmer’s lamentable judgement is clear for all to see

For Keir Starmer, it is just one problem after another. Having impressively withstood the latest attempt on his political life, he is having to deal with yet more scandal involving his No 10 team. He seems unable to escape from the quagmire. You wonder when and how this will all end (though I maintain his fate ultimately lies with the state of the economy).

So here we are with the latest story about the prime minister’s former director of communications, Matthew Doyle. Doyle, who himself is not being accused of anything unlawful, quit his job last March because of his past association with someone who has admitted possession of obscene images of children – obviously vile and a serious offence. Now Doyle has resigned the Labour whip in the Lords, to spare the government further embarrassment. Doyle had been running Starmer’s media operation in opposition and government since 2021. Before that he’d worked for Tony Blair, David Blunkett and Liz Kendall. His New Labour credentials were thus impeccable.

Doyle knew the paedophile concerned, Sean Morton, and helped him campaign to become a local councillor back in 2017. Morton had already, in 2016, been charged with possessing child images, but had maintained his innocence, and Doyle believed him. Bad enough, you might say – but it gets worse. The accusation – and that is all it is – now being levelled against Doyle, Morgan McSweeney, as the Downing Street chief of staff, and, by extension, Starmer is that Doyle continued to have contact with Morton after he, Morton, had subsequently changed his plea to guilty and been found guilty, in 2017, of accessing pictures of girls as young as 10 years old. Now it has emerged that Morton was jailed only last month for similar crimes.

The problem is the nature of an “investigation” last year by Downing Street into Doyle’s links with Morton, after which Doyle was awarded a life peerage in the last new year honours on the formal recommendation, as normal, of the prime minister. The question arises as to whether McSweeney was involved in the decision to put Doyle into the Lords, and whether he and Starmer had adequately determined whether and when Doyle had broken contact with Morton. Was an old comrade being given the benefit of the doubt as they thanked and rewarded him for his outstanding political service, given that he himself has never even been accused of paedophilia?

Again, I stress there’s no suggestion Doyle has done anything remotely illegal, but there are these awkward questions about that association with Morton, just as there are, once again, about McSweeney’s and Starmer’s judgment. The prime minister might well argue that he was given assurances by McSweeney and/or Doyle which later proved to be false. The unfortunate echo of the Epstein-Mandelson scandal is that Starmer may have been too gullible or careless about this appointment to what is, after all, the job of a legislator in the upper house of parliament.

Doyle himself is repentant: “I want to apologise for my past association with Sean Morton. His offences were vile and I completely condemn the actions for which he was rightly convicted. My thoughts are with the victims and all those impacted by these crimes…Following his [Morton’s] conviction any contact was extremely limited and I have not seen or spoken to him in years. Twice I was at events organised by other people, which he attended, and once I saw him to check on his welfare after concerns were raised through others. I acted to try to ensure the welfare of a troubled individual whilst fully condemning the crimes for which he has been convicted and being clear that my thoughts are with the victims of his crimes. I am sorry about the mistakes I have made. I will not be taking the Labour whip.”

That sounds like about as full and candid an explanation as should be expected, but it’s of little use to Starmer as the various scandals pile up, some with a paedophile dimension. Here’s another one. Although with no sign of any link to Starmer, the former Labour mayor of the West of England and current MP for North East Somerset and Hanham, Dan Norris, has just been arrested for a second time on suspicion of rape, sexual assault, voyeurism and upskirting, although police say that they are “no longer actively investigating any sexual offences against children”, previously alleged. Misconduct in a public office is still being looked into. Norris says: “I vigorously and entirely deny the serious allegations made against me. They are untrue. I am challenging them through my legal representatives.”

Paedophilia, it is fair to say, is at the sleaziest end of the sleaze spectrum. In fact, being simply another term for child abuse, ie child cruelty, it is in fact some distance beyond mere sleaze. So any links with paedophiles, no matter how tenuous, have the potential to inflict enormous political damage.

For Starmer, sleaze and scandal threaten to overwhelm him. After all, he has already lost two cabinet ministers for problematic behaviour – Louise Haigh and his deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, as well as the destruction of Mandelson. It is the strangest thing to befall a man whose legal and political career has been based on his integrity and tireless work to protect the vulnerable and, as director of public prosecutions, to pursue the grooming gangs.

The best that can be said for Starmer is that he has made some lamentably poor judgments and been far too gullible about his own associates. Politically, the mistake was to campaign so hard on sleaze and pledge so vehemently to end the scandals that when human frailty in his own party emerged he automatically looked like a massive hypocrite. Worse still, it substantiated the public suspicion that “they’re all the same”. As leader of the opposition, Starmer succumbed too easily to the temptations selflessly served up by the Johnson, Truss and Sunak administrations and made a manifesto promise to “end the chaos of sleaze and division, turn the page, and reset politics to put it back in the service of working people.” What you are witnessing now is Starmer been smashed by one hell of rebound.