The Hypocrisy of the Conservative Party
Accusations of Starmer's "weakness" and of taking too long to act over Rayner's tax affairs highlight Badenoch's short and leaky memory.
Senior Conservatives, including leader Kemi Badenoch, have accused Sir Keir Starmer of weakness over the Angela Rayner Stamp Duty affair, but their own record shows a long habit of indulging ministerial misconduct.
Today, the Conservatives have gone on the attack, branding Starmer weak for not moving faster against Angela Rayner over her tax affairs. Kemi Badenoch led the charge, saying Starmer was too weak to lead and should have removed his deputy immediately from her cabinet posts.
The suggestion is that a Tory Prime Minister would have acted decisively and without hesitation. But this is where the argument collapses. For the last decade and more, the Conservative Party has treated ministerial wrongdoing not as a red line but as something to be explained away, kicked into the long grass, or excused until the headlines became unbearable.
Indulgence as Standard Practice
Under Boris Johnson, ministerial standards were bent out of shape. When an official inquiry concluded that Home Secretary Priti Patel had bullied civil servants, Johnson simply overruled it. Patel stayed in post, while his independent adviser on standards, Sir Alex Allan, quit in protest.
When Health Secretary Matt Hancock was caught on camera kissing an aide in breach of his own lockdown rules, Downing Street first declared the matter “closed.” Johnson accepted an apology and resisted calls for resignation. It was only after public outrage and wall-to-wall coverage that Hancock finally fell.
Even Johnson himself, along with Rishi Sunak, received fixed-penalty notices for breaking lockdown laws in Downing Street. Neither man resigned. The fines were dismissed as minor, an inconvenience rather than the sort of breach that demanded accountability. That defence now sits awkwardly alongside calls for Angela Rayner to be forced aside over allegations that, at the time, had not even been formally investigated.
And then there was Owen Paterson. The Commons found he had committed an “egregious” breach of lobbying rules. Johnson’s response was not to accept the ruling but to try to rip up the entire parliamentary standards system to shield him. Only after a public and political firestorm did the government retreat. Paterson resigned anyway, but the episode was a defining moment in showing just how far the Conservatives were prepared to go to protect one of their own.
Sunak’s “Integrity” Pledge
When Rishi Sunak replaced Johnson, he promised “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level.” In practice, he followed much the same pattern of indulgence.
He appointed Gavin Williamson to cabinet despite being warned about a bullying complaint. When further allegations surfaced, Williamson resigned. Sunak described his departure as “a great sadness,” as if it were a personal loss rather than a question of standards.
He defended Dominic Raab for months while bullying claims stacked up. When the inquiry substantiated several of them, Raab was not dismissed. Instead, he resigned on his own terms, blaming “activist civil servants” on his way out. Sunak again expressed sadness.
He stood by Nadhim Zahawi over his tax affairs, telling Parliament that the matter had been “addressed in full.” Only after an independent inquiry found a serious breach of the ministerial code did Zahawi go.
Then there was Suella Braverman. Sacked as Home Secretary under Liz Truss for breaching the ministerial code by leaking sensitive documents, she was reappointed by Sunak within a week. Later, when she was accused of inflaming tensions around pro-Palestinian protests with unauthorised remarks, Sunak again hesitated. She was eventually removed in a reshuffle, but only after weeks of pressure.
Across all of these episodes, the pattern is the same: defend the minister, delay the reckoning, and only act when the cost of inaction becomes greater than the cost of letting them go.
The Double Standard
The Conservative attack on Starmer over Rayner is tactically neat. It aims at his strongest suit, his reputation for integrity, and seeks to paint him as hesitant and compromised. But by taking this line, the Conservatives invite voters to recall their own record.
For over a decade, successive Tory governments have treated standards in public life as optional, bending rules to protect allies and rewriting codes when they became inconvenient. The very people now demanding instant suspensions and immediate transparency are the same ones who looked the other way for Patel, Hancock, Johnson, Sunak, Raab, Zahawi, Williamson, Braverman, and Paterson.
If there is a weakness on display in British politics today, it is not Starmer’s. It is the weakness of a Conservative Party that has too often put loyalty above integrity, damage control above accountability, and self-preservation above standards.
That is the charge they will struggle to answer.