Dirty money should be Burnham’s fight

The new PM can lead the anti-corruption summit that I planned

(Mykhalio Pavlenko/Shutterstock)

I’m not alone in having served in Keir Starmer’s government and regretted watching our progressive agenda disappear. Working for Labour in opposition, I helped prepare an ambitious anti-corruption agenda for the then shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, to take into office. The idea was simple. For a Labour government to succeed, every department had to show people at home how it was fighting for them. And the Italianate grandeur of the Foreign Office on King Charles Street was no exception.

We promised to hold a major anti-corruption summit in London and to use the Foreign Office to campaign against kleptocrats. This mission got off the ground, with sanctions hitting major money launderers around the world such as Aivars Lembergs, one of Latvia’s richest people, Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president who systematically abused her positions at state-run companies to embezzle at least £350m and Dmitry Firtash, an infamous oligarch who has extracted hundreds of millions of pounds from Ukraine. Much advance policy work and diplomacy was done, but the summit never took place. Despite constant pushing from us, No 10 would never sign off on a date. I was never offered an explanation as to why. After Lammy moved on to Justice, Yvette Cooper fortunately kept our commitment to a summit, even announcing at the end of 2025 that it would take place in June this year, only for it be postponed until December, as the government’s attention shifted elsewhere. This was such a missed opportunity.