Giving Tulip Siddiq anti-corruption job seen by insiders as own goal

Some in No 10 wish they had thought a bit more about how it looked before giving job to niece of ousted Bangladesh PM

The warning signs were always there. When a photo of Tulip Siddiq standing alongside Vladimir Putin and her aunt, the now ousted leader of Bangladesh, emerged in 2015, alarm bells rang within the Labour party.

At the time, Siddiq was the Labour candidate for the marginal seat of Hampstead and Kilburn. Yet she brushed aside concerns over her presence at the signing of a billion-dollar arms deal and nuclear power project at the Kremlin two years earlier.