Keir Starmer can see an opportunity in Tory ‘sleaze’ over Greensill

Nobody knows what the Greensill business is about. The details are mind-numbingly complicated and the bottom line is that the company didn’t get what it wanted out of the government, despite the lobbying on its behalf by David Cameron, and it has now gone bust.

That said, the story is a huge opportunity for Labour to portray the Conservative government as a conspiracy of cronyism against the public interest. Cameron may have failed – and he actually said “my interventions did not lead to a change in the government’s approach” as part of his defence at the weekend – but the impression given is that of mutual favours discussed in private text exchanges among the well-connected.

Anneliese Dodds, the shadow chancellor, saw her chance to try to drag Rishi Sunak to the House of Commons to answer the latest questions about the mind-numbing complications. The chancellor decided to suffer the embarrassment of being called “frit” by his shadow and stayed away, sending Paul Scully, a junior minister from another department (Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy) in his place.

Scully made the best of it. He had the advantage of a civil-service briefing and therefore understood more about the complications than anybody else in the chamber.

Indeed, he couldn’t resist a tiny bit of triumphalism as he goaded the Labour Party for getting its facts muddled. Details matter, he told Wes Streeting, one of Labour’s rising stars. “The details are about asking the right question in the first place.” Because Dodds had asked about Greensill’s role in the coronavirus large business interruption loan scheme, which is run by the British Business Bank, the responsibility of the business department, she faced Scully rather than a junior Treasury minister.

And because Scully knew slightly more about what he was talking about than anyone asking the questions, he was able to get through the session without much difficulty. In any case, any awkward subjects were brushed under the carpet by saying that the prime minister had appointed Nigel Boardman, a lawyer, to investigate and it wouldn’t be right for a mere minister to comment any further.

Yet the Conservatives were nonetheless embarrassed. Emma Lewell-Buck, the Labour MP, reminded the Commons that Dennis Skinner, the former member for Bolsover, had been suspended from the House in 2016 for calling Cameron “dodgy Dave”. That is unparliamentary language, but he is not an MP now and MPs can call the former prime minister what they like.

Labour is not going to let the matter go. It has contrived a vote in the Commons tomorrow that will force MPs to divide on party lines. The recent device adopted by Mark Spencer, the Conservative chief whip, of running away from votes tabled by the opposition won’t work this time. If Labour force a vote on a mere declaratory motion, there are no consequences if Tory MPs are ordered to abstain and the opposition wins.

But tomorrow’s vote is on a substantive motion to set up a select committee to investigate the Greensill affair, and so the Tories will have to vote it down. The motion will be defeated easily, of course, because this is not an issue on which a significant number of Tories are prepared to defy their government. But Labour will be able to claim that they are voting against a “full, transparent, parliamentary inquiry” into the mind-numbingly complicated thing, while suggesting that Boardman is too close to the government, and that his report will be a whitewash.

It all reminds me of the later years of the John Major government, when it felt as if the Conservatives had been in power too long, and the journalistic shorthand “sleaze” became an effective attack for Labour. Sunak and Johnson seem to be knocking over the furniture in their haste to distance themselves from Cameron, just as Johnson presented himself as an entirely new government in 2019, and nothing to do with those ghastly Remainers who had been in charge until then.

But in the mind of many voters, they are all Tories and they are up to no good. Once the coronavirus fades, Johnson will struggle against this perception. And Keir Starmer, who is keeping himself above the fray, leaving the street-fighting to Dodds and Rachel Reeves, rather as Tony Blair did with “sleaze”, will present himself as the “purer than pure” alternative.