Labour leader quizzed at London police station after rider taken to hospital
Police have interviewed Keir Starmer after he was involved in a road collision that put a cyclist in hospital.
The Labour leader was driving his SUV near his home in north London when the incident occurred at around midday on Sunday. An eyewitness described hearing “a loud bang” and then seeing a cyclist on the ground “in a lot of pain” from an arm injury, The Sun reports.
A spokesperson for Starmer said that the politician stayed at the scene until an ambulance arrived. Police subsequently left a message at Starmer’s home asking him to report to the nearby police station in Kentish Town, part of his Holborn and St Pancras constituency, where he is believed to have given a full statement later that day.
He was not arrested nor interviewed under caution.
In what Politico London Playbook’s Alex Wickham describes as “a truly stunning coincidence”, a Sun photographer then snapped Starmer outside the police station yesterday morning – but the Labour leader was subsequently revealed not to have set foot inside.
A source in the leader of the opposition’s office said that Starmer had not returned to talk to police again but rather was just “walking past it on his way home back from the tailors”.
The tailor in question is on Prince of Wales Road, which is a 12-minute walk from the police station and “kind of on the way to Starmer’s house”, so it “sort of checks out”, Wickham reports.
In the run-up to last December’s election, the Labour Party pledged to make England one of the most cycling-friendly places in the world, so that getting around on two wheels was a “genuine option for the many, not just the brave”.