The Mail's stunning Starmer scoop doesn't Czech out

When news broke that Claudia Harmsworth, wife of Mail newspapers owner Lord Rothermere, had donated £50,000 to Reform on September 30, it was soon overshadowed by revelations that Thailand-based Tory and Brexit donor Christopher Harborne had handed the party £9m a month earlier. However, the Mail group can be useful to Nigel Farage in other ways.

After weeks of seeing other papers report on Farage’s schoolboy racism, the Mail on Sunday loyally dispatched its investigations editor, Tom Kelly, to dig deep into what dark secrets lurked in Keir Starmer’s school satchel. “While the concerns about Mr Farage’s suspected teenage comments are clearly understandable, the prime minister’s decision to get involved in a row about what a rival politician allegedly did at school in the late seventies and early eighties inevitably invites scrutiny of his own youth,” intoned the paper darkly.

What amazing scoop did they dig up, justifying more than 2,000 words? Er, Starmer… once went to Czechoslovakia. Describing the trip as “astonishing”, the paper reported how “in 1986, just before his 24th birthday, young Keir travelled to Czechoslovakia to join an international work camp to restore a memorial to victims of a Nazi atrocity.

“It was a visit monitored by communist spies. Unbeknown to Starmer and other overseas volunteers, such camps were part of a long-term and wide-ranging operation by the nation’s secret police force, StB.”

If that wasn’t enough, the Mail also revealed how, at university, Starmer was
involved with “a magazine called Socialist Alternatives… launched by him and a small group of friends in 1986, just a few weeks before he crossed into Czechoslovakia to join his work camp.”

Suggested Reading

The Rachel Reeves chess scandal feels a bit stale, mate

Rats in a Sack

Just how much painful digging did investigations editor Kelly have to do to unearth these incredible scoops? Er… presumably he read pages 82 to 84 of Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin of this parish, where the details are laid out in full.

Meanwhile, as Labourites jockey for position in a post-Starmer future, party watchers are scratching their heads at one name being touted to succeed the
PM. Jason Cowley, the former New Statesman editor who now treats Sunday
Times readers to his insights, is tipping Al Carns, a junior minister only elected last year and not even a household name in his own household.

“The Aberdeen-born armed forces minister [was] decorated for service in
Afghanistan,” Cowley wrote. “Carns is on the rise but untested in parliament,” he added with no little understatement. Could Carns be Labour’s Katie Lam, the Tory MP wildly touted as Kemi Badenoch’s successor during this summer’s silly season?

One former Labour leader definitely on the rise – or taking it – is Vaughan
Gething, short-lived former first minister of Wales, whose elevation to the House of Lords has all but been confirmed. As Rats in a Sack revealed in July, Gething is said to have been the subject of lobbying on his behalf by his friend Jo Stevens, the Wales secretary.

Gething’s peerage is not being universally welcomed in Welsh Labour circles, though. With the party already facing a tonking in next year’s election to Cardiff Bay, some wonder whether now is the time to remind the public of the hapless Gething and his disastrous Truss-like four months in office.