As a newly elected MP, Sir Keir Starmer chose an unusual destination for his first overseas ‘jolly’. Instead of visiting one of the UK’s major allies such as the United States, Germany or France, the rookie Parliamentarian decided in February 2016 to jump on a long-haul flight to Bangladesh.
There, he spent a week visiting the cities of Dhaka and Sylhet, where photos showed him – looking a touch younger and thinner than today – walking in a designer suit through impoverished slums.
‘As we chatted in our (very) broken Bangla with those living in the slum, we were struck by their spirit and resilience,’ wrote Sir Keir, in a dispatch for his local paper. ‘Running water and decent homes may be in short supply, but compassion and humanity overflow.’
The trip, valued at £1,200, culminated in a visit to the wood-panelled HQ of the country’s autocratic female prime minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed.
Here, Starmer presented his smiling host with a signed picture of the Houses of Parliament. Some might call that an underwhelming gift. But this meeting would turn out to be the start of a mutually beneficial relationship between Sir Keir and the Bangladeshi leader.
A few months later, members of the UK branch of Hasina’s party, the Awami League, attended a fundraising dinner in his Holborn and St Pancras constituency. Then, at the 2019 election, Hasina’s British footsoldiers turned out in big numbers to help him canvass local voters.
Starmer cemented his friendship with the Bangladeshi premier in September 2022, when she visited the UK to attend the Queen’s funeral, with a face-to-face encounter at the luxury hotel Claridge’s in London’s Mayfair.
‘It was a pleasure to meet,’ he said later. ‘Under a Labour government, we will continue to strengthen our ties with international allies like Bangladesh.’
Anti-corruption minister Tulip Siddiq is thought to be one of Sir Keir Starmer’s few close personal friends in politics and their families have reportedly holidayed together
Starmer presents Siddiq’s aunt former Bangladeshi leader Sheikh Hasina Wazed with a signed picture of the Houses of Parliament
Following this photo-op, the UK arm of the Awami League was prevailed upon to campaign for Sir Keir at last summer’s General Election. That of course resulted in Starmer entering No 10, at which point Hasina issued public congratulations in a letter that wished him ‘the very best of health, happiness and success’ and waxed lyrical about the ‘Awami League’s enduring friendship with the Labour Party and its iconic leaders’.
All very chummy. Yet to those in the know, Sir Keir’s links to Bangladesh, or at least its PM, have long been considered a dangerous miscalculation.
The reason? The small matter of Hasina’s character. Despite talking a good game on socialism, she has been accused for years of presiding over a despotic and corrupt regime which rigged elections, jailed critics and murdered political opponents.
During her period in government, which began in 2008, around 600 rivals were ‘forcibly disappeared’ according to a report to the United Nations. That appeared to sit extremely awkwardly with both the UK and Labour’s supposed commitment to human rights.
By the time of Starmer’s election, matters were rapidly coming to a head. Back in Bangladesh, students critical of Hasina had been staging street protests since 2022. Last July police were instructed to launch a crackdown. That resulted in the death of four demonstrators, sparking further protests that led to dozens and then hundreds more deaths.
Come early August, the country was in meltdown. On the first Sunday of the month, the uprising saw Hasina forced from power. She fled on a helicopter before angry crowds stormed the prime ministerial palace.
So far, so messy. And the series of events has since left Sir Keir with two headaches.
One is diplomatic: the UK must now attempt to cosy up with Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel peace laureate leading Bangladesh’s interim government in advance of forthcoming elections. It’s unclear whether the relationship will be tainted by Starmer’s long-standing friendship with the country’s freshly-deposed autocrat.
The rental flat in King’s Cross, given to Siddiq, 42, by a businessman close to her aunt named Abdul Motalif back in 2004
The other problem is both personal and political: for the downfall of Hasina has sparked an explosive scandal which threatens the career of one of Starmer’s closest allies: the Treasury minister Tulip Siddiq.
At its centre is a pressing fact: Siddiq, who was elected as an MP in the same 2015 cohort as Starmer (and represents the neighbouring constituency of Hampstead and Highgate), happens to be the niece of the ousted Bangladeshi autocrat.
This places her at the heart of a corruption inquiry that was recently announced by the country’s incoming government.
It revolves around allegations that millions and perhaps billions of pounds have been unlawfully funnelled out of Bangladesh via bribes and kickbacks to Hasina and various relatives.
Particular questions, in this context revolve around a string of valuable London properties that have been given or lent to Tulip Siddiq and her immediate family, in highly unusual circumstances, by wealthy Bangladeshi supporters of the Awami League.
The most curious is a rental flat in King’s Cross, which was given to Siddiq, 42, by a businessman close to her aunt named Abdul Motalif back in 2004. It’s now worth around £700,000.
For reasons that are unclear, Siddiq has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep this transaction secret since she entered the Commons. Indeed, when rumours about it first circulated, back in May 2022, she managed to keep details out of the Press by falsely telling a reporter the flat had been a gift from her parents.
Siddiq (pictured) spoke of how Starmer had been ‘a good friend through thick and thin’ on the day he was elected Labour leader
‘The allegations you have set out are inaccurate and highly damaging,’ read an email from the future minister’s Parliamentary account to the Mail on Sunday, which had asked her about Motalif’s gift. ‘Tulip will not hesitate to take legal action if they are included in any article you intend to publish.’
Her legal threat succeeded in keeping the whole thing under wraps until last week, when details were finally reported by the Financial Times. At this point, Siddiq made a bizarre statement denying she had brazenly lied. Her spokesman said: ‘Tulip’s previous understanding of how she gained ownership of the property has changed.’ Quite the euphemism.
And that’s not all. For it has also recently emerged that the £2million house in Finchley, north London, where she has lived since July 2022 with her management consultant husband Christian St John Percy and their two young children, turns out to belong to one Abdul Karim, a member of the Awami League’s UK executive.
Last year, Mr Karim was granted special status as a ‘Commercially Important Person’ by Hasina, which allowed him access to state events, first-class travel domestically and letters of introduction abroad signed by Bangladesh’s foreign mission.
After Siddiq moved into the house in Finchley, Karim was appointed vice-chairman of a bank in Bangladesh.
A source told the Mail on Sunday that Karim had no experience in the banking sector and that calls had been made from the Bangladeshi PM’s office to lobby for his appointment.
Siddiq referred herself this week to the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards, Sir Laurie Magnus
Reporters have been unable to establish whether Siddiq and her husband are paying market rent for the property, which would usually fetch around £5,000 a month, but the arrangement has allowed them since 2022 to rent out a second flat in north London, where they had previously lived.
Siddiq failed to declare income from that property to the Parliamentary authorities for more than a year, until reporters began sniffing around the arrangement.
The revelations don’t end there. For questions are also being asked about a third property in Hampstead where Siddiq lived in the 2010s. It’s owned by her sister Azmina, who once worked for Tony Blair, but it was apparently given to her by Moin Ghani, a Bangladeshi lawyer who has represented Hasina’s government.
As for Siddiq’s mother (and Hasina’s sister), Rehana, she lives in a property in Golders Green, north London, which is owned through an offshore trust by Shayan Rahman, the son of a billionaire politician and adviser to Hasina. Rehana previously occupied a nearby property owned by Kazi Zafarullah, a member of the Awami League’s executive committee.
It’s a highly unorthodox arrangement. And a very bad look for Siddiq, given that her ministerial role includes overseeing efforts to tackle corruption in the City of London. At the banks she is responsible for regulating, compliance departments take a very dim view about accepting valuable gifts from politically connected foreigners, especially when they hail from Third World territories such as Bangladesh.
For Starmer, this ongoing controversy hits particularly close to home. Tulip is thought to be one of his few close personal friends in politics and their families have reportedly holidayed together.
Indeed, on the day in 2020 when Starmer was elected Labour leader, Siddiq spoke of how he had been ‘a good friend through thick and thin’.
The PM had described her as ‘my good friend and colleague’ when he joined her on campaign trail for local elections in 2018.
The duo have chums in common, too. As recently as December 5, Starmer was filmed at a black tie event in London chatting to one Anwaruzzaman Chowdhury, the Awami League’s UK general secretary. On Instagram, Chowdhury said the pair had discussed ‘the current situation in Bangladesh’.
Meanwhile in Dhaka, the government agency responsible for money-laundering and corruption this week ordered all 61 banks in the country to hand over details of any accounts Siddiq holds with them. Siddiq has denied wrongdoing and claims not to have any overseas bank accounts.
Nonetheless, she referred herself this week to the Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards, Sir Laurie Magnus.
He is expected to investigate her unorthodox property arrangements, and whether she has lied about them.
In truth, questions about Siddiq’s ties to Bangladesh have been doing the rounds since 2013, when she decided to seek the Labour nomination in the former constituency of Oscar-winning actress Glenda Jackson.
Days after she announced her candidacy, an email was sent to colleagues in Camden, where she was a councillor, claiming that her family was involved in corruption in Bangladesh.
It contained a photograph taken earlier that year in Moscow, which showed Siddiq and her aunt posing for a photograph with Vladimir Putin, following negotiations over a billion-dollar arms deal.
Siddiq claimed the whole thing was part of a smear campaign by Hasina’s UK-based opponents, and reported the email to the police. However, it’s unclear what laws she felt had been broken – the photo of her with Putin was perfectly genuine – and no arrests were ever made.
She explained the photo by telling an interviewer that during an innocent social call to Russia to meet her aunt (Moscow is a quicker flight than Dhaka) she’d been invited to the Kremlin and been briefly coerced by Putin into posing for a picture, saying: ‘It was two seconds, but I can see why people might take it out of context.’
A couple of years later, Siddiq claimed to have used the occasion to challenge Putin about gay rights: ‘You have the man in front of you, why wouldn’t you ask for his stance on the treatment of LGBT people in Russia?’ she told an interviewer.
‘He avoided the question. But I can tell my grandchildren I did it.’
The hoo-ha did nothing to stop Siddiq gaining the Labour nomination, securing the support of an astonishing array of North London’s celebrity elite.
She was endorsed by everyone from writers Melvyn Bragg, Zadie Smith, Alan Bennett and Bonnie Greer to actors Emma Thompson, Greg Wise, Alan Davies and Richard Wilson, and comedian Eddie Izzard.
London’s Evening Standard went so far as to tell its readers that the glamorous parliamentary hopeful had ‘already been tipped as a future PM’.
When Siddiq won the seat in the May 2015 General Election, Hasina travelled to London, where she was pictured kissing her niece’s forehead at an Awami League reception at the Sheraton on Park Lane.
The next day, the Bangladeshi PM attended Parliament to proudly watch her maiden speech.
Siddiq was endorsed by figures including Melvyn Bragg, Zadie Smith, Alan Bennett and Bonnie Greer to actors Emma Thompson, Greg Wise, Alan Davies and Richard Wilson, and comedian Eddie Izzard
Despite the show of support, Siddiq was by this stage taking unusual steps to distance herself – in the public eye, at least – from the Awami League.
She updated her personal website to delete references to her former job as a ‘spokesperson’ for the party (she’d even been listed as one of Bangladesh’s official representatives at the UN General Assembly in 2011), and took down a blog in which she’d described working for her aunt during the country’s 2008 elections.
‘The Awami League have won the elections by a landslide! Sheikh Hasina is the Prime Minister elect! I am ecstatic!’ reads one of the deleted posts. ‘I’ve been on the campaign trail with Sheikh Hasina all day.’
The vexed question of her closeness to Sheikh Hasina came spectacularly to a head in 2017, when Siddiq became heavily involved in a high-profile campaign to free her constituent Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British citizen who had been jailed in Iran on trumped-up charges of spying.
Channel 4 News had been approached by lawyers and family members of another figure who had been unfairly jailed by a foreign regime – this time in Bangladesh – a British-trained lawyer named Ahmad Bin Quasem.
Quasem, the son of a prominent opposition Bangladeshi politician, had been imprisoned by the regime a year earlier. His supporters in Britain had repeatedly asked Siddiq to use her connections to secure his release, but she’d failed even to return their calls.
Channel 4 then approached the MP to ask why – at a time when she was going vigorously into bat for Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran – she was refusing to help the poor chap unfairly locked up in Bangladesh.
Siddiq’s response was extraordinary: she called the police, claiming that Channel 4’s reporter Alex Thomson had committed a racially aggravated common assault.
The complaint was investigated. But Britain is not Bangladesh, where politicians seem able to throw discourteous journalists into the slammer, so the whole thing was, rightly, dropped.
Siddiq was also caught on tape making a sinister remark to Daisy Ayliffe, a female Channel 4 News producer working on the story, who was heavily pregnant. ‘Thanks Daisy for coming. Hope you have a great birth because child labour is hard,’ she said, before filing formal complaints to Ofcom and the station’s bosses.
‘Fortunately, what actually happened was recorded,’ recalled Ayliffe this week. ‘If not, she could have cost me my job.’
Quasem’s family was not so lucky. On the day Channel 4’s piece about Tulip was broadcast, Sheikh Hasina’s armed police raided their home in Dhaka and warned his terrified wife to ‘remain low’.
Siddiq’s aunt Sheikh Hasina shakes hands with Russian president Vladimir Putin in January 2013
Siddiq later apologised for her unpleasant remark to Ayliffe, but denied being responsible for the police raid on Quasem.
Since Keir Starmer then made the glamorous MP his anti-corruption minister, and continued to break bread with her autocratic aunt, he must have assumed she’d done nothing wrong. Today, five long years later, Tulip Siddiq’s links to Bangladesh are once again in the spotlight.
According to yesterday’s newspapers, No 10 officials are already drawing up a shortlist of Labour MPs to replace the dictator’s niece as our anti-corruption minister.
The big question now is whether Sir Keir is ruthless enough to sack his best friend in politics.
- Additional reporting: Matt Brown