On Tuesday afternoon, Labour’s Tulip Siddiq resigned from her publish as Metropolis minister.
It was the end result of weeks and weeks of tales about Siddiq’s funds and household ties. For, as political correspondent Kiran Stacey explains, Siddiq comes from a very extraordinary political household: her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, was the prime minister of Bangladesh for 15 years.
This had been a long-known reality about Siddiq, however largely handled as an attention-grabbing quirk – till the autumn final summer season of Sheikh Hasina, who was pressured to flee Bangladesh after a wave of protests from individuals sad in regards to the nation’s stuttering economic system and Hasina’s more and more authoritarian rule.
And, as Hannah Moore hears, when Hasina’s successors got here to energy quickly after, they began a sequence of sprawling anti-corruption investigations into the household – investigations that allege that the Hampstead and Kilburn MP Siddiq benefited instantly from her aunt’s energy and connections.
Siddiq and her household deny any wrongdoing, whether or not it’s over facilitating a corrupt deal over a Russian-financed nuclear energy plant in 2013, or over London properties – many purchased by shut allies of Hasina’s regime – through which Siddiq appears to have lived over the past twenty years. The investigations, they argue, are a part of a political smear marketing campaign towards Hasina and her social gathering.
But the cumulative tales have been sufficient to pressure Siddiq from her position this week – that they had develop into, she stated in her resignation letter to Keir Starmer, ‘a distraction’ from the work of the federal government.
So what now for Tulip Siddiq, who’s going through felony fees in Bangladesh? And what does the episode say in regards to the judgment of Starmer, who appointed Siddiq within the first place?
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