How can Starmer survive the Mail on Sunday's stunning scoop?
The story, by the paper's Glen Owen and Mark Hookham, claimed that 'before meeting his wife, Victoria, Sir Keir spent 'years' in a relationship with Maya Sikand KC, a high-flying barrister who now works as a part-time Crown Court judge'. It added: 'Six years ago, Ms Sikand, 55, was at the centre of a legal row at the chambers where she worked, with a colleague claiming in court papers that she was part of a group that 'explicitly endorsed the trans rights agenda''.
Could Keir Starmer's time as prime minister be running out, following an incredible scoop from the Mail on Sunday? While the rest of Fleet Street was distracted by the pope's funeral, the MoS bravely bucked the trend and splashed on an 'exclusive' that… a woman who Starmer dated the best part of three decades ago has since espoused pro-trans views.
In Mail world, this is incontrovertible evidence that Starmer is at best a hypocrite and at worst a liar after he last week endorsed the Supreme Court's ruling that sex in the Equality Act refers to biological sex. In reality, however, the relationship between Starmer and Sikand appears to date back to the late 1990s. Starmer married Victoria in 2007. And the Supreme Court itself wasn't established until 2009. Sikand, meanwhile, is such a formative influence in the PM's life that she warrants not a single mention in Tom Baldwin's acclaimed biography.
(The Mail on Sunday did argue that 'both later contributed to a legal textbook, Blackstone's Criminal Practice, published in 2008'. Which they did – along with a sizable number of other contributors, in a book weighing in at 3,492 pages).
The scoop came via an updated version of the biography Red Flag by former Tory deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft, whose previous dodgy claims include the story of David Cameron putting his right honourable member in the mouth of a dead pig. Owen's journalistic hits, meanwhile, include Angela Rayner distracting Boris Johnson in the House of Commons by uncrossing her legs.
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