After Tulip Siddiq’s departure, Keir Starmer can breathe a sigh of relief

The Daily Mail got half of what it wanted. Its front page on Tuesday morning was “Two Lame Ducks”, and called for the resignations of Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, and Tulip Siddiq, a junior minister in Reeves’s Treasury.

Reeves came out fighting in the Commons, delivering a confident defence of herself and her policies, and making Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, look a little foolish. Stride had no alternative policy to propose, but he had some Shakespearean flourishes: “To resign or not to resign, that is now the question,” he said.

It turned out that this was a question for a different minister, who was at that moment putting the finishing touches to a resignation letter, while No 10 was finalising the announcement of a new economic secretary to the Treasury and a promotion from the back benches.

The operation was carried out with speed and some precision. Laurie Magnus, the prime minister’s adviser on ministerial standards, carried out his investigation more quickly than journalists expected, and Siddiq was allowed to resign to avoid further “distraction from the work of the government”.

Keir Starmer’s reply to her letter maintained this polite fiction, saying: “I appreciate that to end ongoing distraction from delivering our agenda to change Britain, you have made a difficult decision.” He even went as far as to suggest that she might be back, saying he wanted to be “clear that the door remains open for you, going forward”.

I suspect that this door is the same one that was supposedly left open for Louise Haigh, the former transport secretary, after her resignation in November: if either of them tried it, they would find that it was firmly and mysteriously locked.

Siddiq claims in her letter of resignation that Magnus “confirmed that I have not breached the ministerial code” and noted that “there is no evidence to suggest that I have acted improperly in relation to the properties I have owned or lived in”. Which is true – but Magnus’s letter is hardly the clean bill of health that she claims it is.

The prime minister’s ethics adviser says: “She was unaware of the origins of her ownership of her flat in Kings Cross, despite having signed a Land Registry transfer form relating to the gift at the time.” This may not have been a technical breach of the ministerial code, but Magnus says that, as a result, “the public were inadvertently misled about the identity of the donor”.

That sounds like a resigning matter, and the rest of Magnus’s letter is hardly any better for her. He says it is “regrettable” that she was “not more alert to the potential reputational risks”, and advises that the prime minister should at least “consider” whether she should be the minister responsible for anti-corruption measures.

Starmer clearly decided well before the announcement that it was time for Siddiq to go. This was a ruthless decision: the two are constituency neighbours, and shared an election count at Camden Town Hall. He was polite enough to allow her to resign with as much dignity as possible, but he had already lined up her successor.

Emma Reynolds was one of the promising MPs who came into parliament in 2010, who was cut down in the 2019 Boris Johnson landslide, and who came back last July. She takes over as economic secretary, while Torsten Bell, the former Ed Miliband adviser and head of the Resolution Foundation, steps up from the back benches to take Reynolds’s place as an even more junior Treasury minister (with a side-hustle at the department of work and pensions).

With Reeves securing her position – which was never seriously under threat – by a strong performance in parliament on Tuesday, and Siddiq dispatched cleanly and without fuss, Starmer ended the day with his government a little stronger than it had been at the start.