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On Tuesday afternoon, Labour’s Tulip Siddiq resigned from her post as City minister.
It was the culmination of weeks and weeks of stories about Siddiq’s finances and family ties. For, as political correspondent Kiran Stacey explains, Siddiq comes from a truly extraordinary political family: her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, was the prime minister of Bangladesh for 15 years.
This had been a long-known fact about Siddiq, but mostly treated as an interesting quirk – until the fall last summer of Sheikh Hasina, who was forced to flee Bangladesh after a wave of protests from people unhappy about the country’s stuttering economy and Hasina’s increasingly authoritarian rule.
And, as Hannah Moore hears, when Hasina’s successors came to power soon after, they started a series of sprawling anti-corruption investigations into the family – investigations that allege that the Hampstead and Kilburn MP Siddiq benefited directly from her aunt’s power and connections.
Siddiq and her family deny any wrongdoing, whether it’s over facilitating a corrupt deal over a Russian-financed nuclear power plant in 2013, or over London properties – many bought by close allies of Hasina’s regime – in which Siddiq seems to have lived over the last two decades. The investigations, they argue, are part of a political smear campaign against Hasina and her party.
Yet the cumulative stories were enough to force Siddiq from her role this week – they had become, she said in her resignation letter to Keir Starmer, ‘a distraction’ from the work of the government.
So what now for Tulip Siddiq, who is facing criminal charges in Bangladesh? And what does the episode say about the judgment of Starmer, who appointed Siddiq in the first place?
