British Prime Minister Keir Starmer‘s woes continue as he answers yet again for an ally’s connections to a convicted child sex offender.
Starmer was forced to strip Matthew Doyle, his former chief of communications, of his membership in the Labour Party on Monday after it emerged that Doyle previously campaigned for a friend charged with possessing indecent images of children.
Doyle, who Starmer made a peer in the House of Lords in December, campaigned for Labour councillor Sean Morton in 2017 after he was charged with possessing the illicit pornography — a charge to which Morton would eventually plead guilty. Doyle apologized earlier this week.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch grilled Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday over the fact that Doyle was ennobled despite a story in the Sunday Times that exposed his work for Morton immediately following his selection for the peerage. She scolded Starmer for giving Doyle “a job for life in the House of Lords” despite his work with Morton.
“To appoint one pedophile supporter cannot be excused as ‘misfortune’. To appoint two shows a catastrophic lack of judgment,” she said in the House of Commons.
“Matthew Doyle did not give a full account of his actions,” Starmer said in his own defense at the Prime Minister’s Questions. “I promised my party and my country there will be change, and yesterday I removed the whip from Matthew Doyle.”
The questions devolved into a back-and-forth of outrage as Starmer said he would “take no lectures from the Tories on standards in public life,” citing Boris Johnson‘s “Partygate” scandal and recent comments from Tory MP Robert Jenrick about “not seeing enough white faces in Birmingham.”
“How dare he criticize us?” Badenoch shot back. “We weren’t the ones stuffing government with hypocrites and pedophile apologists.”
Doyle’s downfall comes as Starmer struggles to contain the fallout from revelations that former British ambassador to the United States, Lord Peter Mandelson, regularly provided government information to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein following his conviction for soliciting a child prostitute.
Starmer, who appointed Mandelson despite his known connection to Epstein, insists the former ambassador concealed the nature and extent of their relationship, which also included monetary gifts from the sex offender.
Another member of Starmer’s party is further contributing to the headline-dominating omnipresence of Epstein in the British press.
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote an op-ed in the New Statesman on Wednesday, urging British authorities to question Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Duke of York and another close Epstein associate.
Brown, who said he has spent the last week delving “deep into the Epstein files to discover the extent of Mandelson and Epstein’s betrayal of Britain,” alleged that incomplete flight logs for Epstein’s “Lolita Express” at Stansted Airport betray the fact that police have “little or no idea who was being trafficked through our country, and for whom other than Epstein.”
Drawing attention to a cache of emails that concerns “logistics of registering trafficked girls for English-as-a-foreign-language courses, as a route to obtaining US visas,” Brown suggested authorities must investigate if the scheme involved transport through the U.K.
“I have been told privately that the investigations related to the former Prince Andrew did not properly check vital evidence of flights,” Brown wrote. “I have asked the police to look at this as part of the new inquiry. The Stansted revelations alone require them to interview Andrew.”
Mountbatten-Windsor has been quietly living at a cottage in Sandringham since unceremoniously fleeing his residence at the Royal Lodge.
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King Charles III, Mountbatten-Windsor’s older brother, has expressed “profound concern at allegations that continue to come to light” about the former duke.
“While the specific claims in question are for Mr Mountbatten-Windsor to address, if we are approached by Thames Valley Police, we stand ready to support them as you would expect,” a Buckingham Palace spokesperson said. “As was previously stated, their majesties’ thoughts and sympathies have been, and remain with, the victims of any and all forms of abuse.”
Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Parkinson has confirmed that the Crown Prosecution Service has not yet been asked for counsel on the investigations being carried out by the Metropolitan and Thames Valley police.