Debbie B retweetledi
Beating Yourself Up Is Not the Same as Being Accountable
Keir Starmer has discovered a new defence. Not ignorance, which the vetting documents destroyed. Not deception, which the paper trail contradicts. Something softer and harder to prosecute. He beats himself up. He dwells on it. He is, he assures us, his own harshest critic.
Accountability has consequences. It involves the surrender of something: office, authority, the power to make the next mistake. Self-flagellation on a podcast involves none of those things. It is the political equivalent of a public apology that asks the wronged party to comfort the wrongdoer. Starmer is not accepting consequences. He is asking for sympathy while retaining everything.
Consider what he is actually saying. That no external criticism can match the severity of his internal verdict. That he has, in effect, already punished himself more harshly than anyone else could. The logical implication is that further accountability is therefore unnecessary. He has handled it. Internally. In his own head. The matter is closed. That is not accountability. It's theatre.
It is not closed. A man with a known, documented relationship with a convicted paedophile was placed in Britain's most sensitive diplomatic post. The vetting file flagged the risk in writing. The national security adviser said the process was weirdly rushed. The chief of staff who drove the appointment has resigned. The phone containing the key messages has disappeared. A police investigation was filed under the wrong address and closed. A disgraced peer was paid £75,000 of public money to stop him talking.
Starmer did not stumble into this. He signed off on it. He knew about the Epstein connection. He chose to proceed. That is not a mistake in the ordinary sense of the word. A mistake is what happens when you act without sufficient information. Starmer had the information. The vetting document existed. The warnings were made. The decision to override them was deliberate.
He invokes his twenty years fighting violence against women and girls as context for the error, as if a long record of good work provides a credit account against which bad decisions can be offset. But that record does not bear the weight he places on it. As Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer presided over a Crown Prosecution Service that failed to prosecute grooming gangs operating openly in towns across the north of England. Girls were being abused on an industrial scale. The institution he led looked the other way. He has never offered a satisfactory account of why. A man whose professional legacy includes that failure is not well placed to invoke the protection of women and girls as a shield against scrutiny.
The victims of Jeffrey Epstein did not receive an apology from a man beating himself up on a podcast. They received one more reminder that the powerful operate by different rules. That the standard applied to them is internal, private and self-assessed. That the harshest critic of Keir Starmer is, conveniently, Keir Starmer, and that he has already delivered his verdict and found the sentence acceptable.
A Prime Minister who knowingly placed a compromised figure at the heart of Britain's most important diplomatic relationship, then watched the evidence trail go cold, then told the country he feels really bad about it, has not met the threshold that public office demands. He has met the threshold that self-preservation requires. Those are not the same thing. And the country knows the difference.
"It is the political equivalent of a public apology that asks the wronged party to comfort the wrongdoer. Starmer is not accepting consequences. He is asking for sympathy while retaining everything."
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