Conservative shadow minister Alex Burghart has claimed that Labour whips have been calling MPs all night in a bid to ensure that they do not back a parliamentary sleaze inquiry into Sir Keir Starmer.
Burghart told GB News: “The Conservatives have been leading on this, but we’re working with all of the other opposition parties as well, because it’s very obvious what’s happened here. The Prime Minister has misled the House.
“The Prime Minister lied to Parliament and then refused to admit that he’d done anything wrong, and so we’re starting this formal process. The vote today is just on whether that will be formally investigated by a cross-party group of MPs, and the fact that the Labour Party doesn’t want that investigation to go ahead, i’s very clear that they’ve got something to hide, very clear that the Prime Minister’s got something to hide.
“He’s getting desperate, because he knows that if that committee looks into it, he’ll be found guilty. Nobody will know what the numbers are until we have the vote because the Labour whips are clearly so uncertain that their MPs will support and that they’ve been calling them all night.
“Let’s wait and see what happens later. We know that there are a lot of Labour MPs who are absolutely furious with this prime minister. They think he’s been serially dishonest. They think that he’s let the country down. They think he’s let the Labour Party down.
“This is an opportunity for them to say, ‘Look, you need to be investigated. You’ve lied to the House, and you need to be held to account’. The Labour Party MPs on the backbenches have an opportunity to do the right thing today. We hope that they will.”
On the controversy over the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, he said: “We’ve said all along, it’s wrong. When we were in power, we changed the law so it couldn’t happen, and Labour have come in and they’re trying to undo it. So I’m very concerned about it too. The Conservative Party will keep on fighting this every step of the way.
“We had a group of veterans come and talk to us in Parliament Square yesterday. It’s very, very hard to find anyone outside of the Labour Party who thinks that this is a good idea. It’s not. It’s a very bad idea.
“It’s an idea that comes out of the minds of people like Keir Starmer and Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, who used to prosecute soldiers in their former jobs.
“I think deep down, most British people know that this is desperately unfair, that we are failing to protect the people who once protected us, the soldiers who went out to Northern Ireland and created the conditions for the peace process in the first place.”