DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Cynical smear tactics demean Sir Keir 

For all his subsequent failings, Tony Blair won power in 1997 with a bright and optimistic vision of how he would govern.

Slogans such as ‘education, education, education’ and ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ may ultimately have proved hollow but they caught the public mood for change.

His predecessor Harold Wilson had been equally determined to accentuate the positive in the 1964 election campaign and rise above gutter politics. ‘The Labour Party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing,’ he said.

How different the party looks today. That sense of moral purpose has given way to pure cynicism, where winning at all costs trumps such petty considerations as honesty and fairness.

Labour adverts claiming Rishi Sunak doesn’t believe child sex offenders should be sent to prison and that he is ‘effectively decriminalising rape’ are patently untrue and thoroughly obnoxious.

Labour adverts claiming Rishi Sunak doesn’t believe child sex offenders should be sent to prison and that he is ‘effectively decriminalising rape’ are patently untrue and thoroughly obnoxious

Yet they are not some aberration. They emanate from the very top of Labour. In today’s Mail, leader Sir Keir Starmer writes: ‘I stand by every word.’

Let’s be clear. The performance of the police and criminal justice system over 13 years of Conservative and coalition rule has been desperately poor and Sir Keir has every right to attack it.

He is also entirely correct in saying that it’s ‘ordinary, decent people’ who suffer when crime goes unpunished. But to suggest, as he does, that Mr Sunak is willing to ‘let criminals get away with it’, is simply false.

He wasn’t even in Parliament for part of the relevant period and was not responsible for sentencing guidelines. Sir Keir, by contrast, has awkward questions to answer on that score.

At least part of the reason why many child sex abusers escape jail may be traced back to a 2012 ruling by the Sentencing Council that such offenders should not automatically receive a prison term.

As director of public prosecutions, Sir Keir sat on the council at the time. So did he disagree with that decision, or was he party to it? Surely we should be told.

Yet they are not some aberration. They emanate from the very top of Labour. In today’s Mail, leader Sir Keir Starmer writes: ‘I stand by every word’

And if Mr Sunak, as leader, is deemed responsible for Tory failings, shouldn’t Sir Keir equally accept some blame for the decision not to prosecute Jimmy Savile when he was head of the Crown Prosecution Service? He might not have been the lead lawyer on the case but he was in charge.

He bridles at any suggestion he was culpable, but that’s the problem when you decide to play the man rather than the ball. You can’t complain when the other side comes in with studs up.

Mr Sunak is by no means immune from criticism but an apologist for paedophiles he is not. The voters know that and so do many senior Labour figures, who have disowned the ad campaign.

Even John McDonnell, scourge of the Tories and class warrior supreme, believes these ad hominem attacks are wrong. ‘The Labour Party should be better than this,’ he said.

The Mail believes the vast majority of voters will agree with him. Sir Keir clearly thinks this grubby ad campaign will further his Downing Street ambitions. It may well have exactly the opposite effect.

Mr Sunak is by no means immune from criticism but an apologist for paedophiles he is not. The voters know that and so do many senior Labour figures, who have disowned the ad campaign

Playing the system

There is something distasteful about the British Medical Association’s advice to striking junior doctors that they should make up the money lost on strike days by working lucrative locum shifts later in the month, when there will be ‘plenty of work available’.

There will be so much work available because operations will have been postponed because of the strike. For doctors to then profit from their action looks distinctly like playing the system – at the expense of patients.