After Tulip Siddiq’s departure, Keir Starmer can breathe a sigh of relief

The Daily Mail got half of what it wanted. Its front page on Tuesday morning was “Two Lame Ducks”, and called for the resignations of Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Tulip Siddiq, a junior minister in Reeves’s Treasury. Laurie Magnus, the prime minister’s adviser on ministerial standards, carried out his investigation more quickly than journalists expected, and Siddiq was allowed to resign to avoid further “distraction from the work of the government”. Keir Starmer’s reply to her letter maintained this polite fiction, saying: “I appreciate that to end ongoing distraction from delivering our agenda to change Britain, you have made a difficult decision.” He even went as far as to suggest that she might be back, saying he wanted to be “clear that the door remains open for you, going forward”. The prime minister’s ethics adviser says: “She was unaware of the origins of her ownership of her flat in Kings Cross, despite having signed a Land Registry transfer form relating to the gift at the time.” This may not have been a technical breach of the ministerial code, but Magnus says that, as a result, “the public were inadvertently misled about the identity of the donor”.