Keir Starmer says peer with links to paedophile did not give ‘full account of his actions’

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said a peer “did not give a full account of his actions” amid scrutiny over his friendship with a convicted sex offender.

Lord Doyle, Starmer’s former director of communications, has been suspended from the parliamentary Labour Party over his links to Sean Morton, a former Labour councillor in Moray who was convicted of offences relating to possessing indecent images of children in 2017.

There are calls from within the party to now strip Doyle of his peerage.

Doyle is reported to have campaigned for Morton after he was charged in December 2016.

The matter was raised at Prime Minister’s Questions by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, who said details of Doyle’s association with Morton had been published on the front page of The Sunday Times.

She added: “Yet despite the prime minister knowing this, he gave Doyle a job for life in the House of Lords anyway. Why?”

Starmer responded: “Matthew Doyle did not give a full account of his actions. On Monday, I promised in my party and my country, there would be change. Yesterday, I removed the whip from Matthew Doyle.”

In a statement Doyle said contact with Morton “was extremely limited and I have not seen or spoken to him in years”.

He added: “I want to apologise for my past association with Sean Morton. His offences were vile, and I completely condemn the actions for which he was rightly convicted. My thoughts are with the victims and all those impacted by these crimes.

“At the point of my campaigning support, Morton repeatedly asserted to all those who knew him his innocence, including initially in court. He later changed his plea in court to guilty.

“To have not ceased support ahead of a judicial conclusion was a clear error of judgement for which I apologise unreservedly.”

Scottish Labour has also removed the whip from MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy who continued a friendship with Morton after he was convicted, something she later accepted was a “serious error of personal judgement”.

The MSP stood down as the party’s education spokesperson in December when her friendship with Morton became public. She later confirmed she would not seek re-election in May.

At PMQs, SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn accused the prime minister of being “the most gullible former director of public prosecutions in history”.

Flynn said: “[The prime minister] has a slight problem because some of us do read the newspapers. Towards the end of last year, indeed on the 30^th of December, having written to the House of Lords’ appointments commission, I received a response from the chair who advised me that as part of their vetting, they provide confidential advice to the prime minister on the proprietary of a potential nominee.

“Will he release that advice?”

In response, the prime minister said: “I’ve made my position clear – he knows how the system works.

“He says he reads the newspapers – he will have read that in nine days, their former party chief executive goes on trial for embezzling money. And he’ll have read that in the Queen Elizabeth hospital, we see one of the worst failures in Scottish public life.”