As a newly elected Member of Parliament, Sir Keir Starmer opted for an unconventional destination for his first overseas visit. Instead of choosing one of the UK's key allies like the United States, Germany, or France, the fresh Parliamentarian embarked on a long-haul flight to Bangladesh in February 2016.

During his week-long visit, he toured the cities of Dhaka and Sylhet. Photographs from the trip depict a younger and slimmer Starmer, dressed in a designer suit, walking through impoverished slums. 

Reflecting on the experience in a column for his local newspaper, Starmer wrote, "As we communicated in our (very) limited Bangla with the residents of the slum, we were deeply moved by their spirit and resilience. While running water and adequate housing are scarce, compassion and humanity are abundant."

The trip, costing around £1,200, concluded with a visit to the wood-panelled headquarters of Bangladesh's autocratic Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed. Starmer presented her with a signed photograph of the Houses of Parliament—a gift some might consider modest. However, this meeting marked the beginning of a mutually beneficial relationship between Starmer and the Bangladeshi leader.

Months later, members of the UK branch of Hasina’s party, the Awami League, participated in a fundraising dinner in Starmer's Holborn and St Pancras constituency. By the 2019 election, Hasina’s British supporters were actively helping him canvass local voters in significant numbers.

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.’

Following this photo opportunity, the UK branch of the Awami League was enlisted to campaign for Sir Keir in the previous summer's General Election. This effort contributed to Starmer's entry into No 10, after which Hasina publicly congratulated him in a letter, wishing him "the very best of health, happiness, and success" and praising the "Awami League’s enduring friendship with the Labour Party and its iconic leaders."

While this relationship seemed amicable, those familiar with the situation have long viewed Sir Keir’s ties to Bangladesh, particularly its Prime Minister, as a risky misstep.

The cause for concern lies in Hasina's reputation. Despite her socialist rhetoric, she has faced longstanding accusations of leading a despotic and corrupt regime, marked by election rigging, the imprisonment of critics, and the assassination of political opponents.

Since her government began in 2008, approximately 600 political rivals have been "forcibly disappeared," according to a United Nations report, casting a stark contrast to the UK's and Labour’s professed commitment to human rights.

By the time Starmer was elected, tensions in Bangladesh were escalating. Since 2022, students opposing Hasina had been staging protests. In July of the following year, police were ordered to suppress these demonstrations, resulting in the deaths of four protestors. This sparked further protests, leading to dozens and eventually hundreds more fatalities.

The nation was in a state of complete collapse by early August. Hasina was overthrown by the rebellion on the first Sunday of the month. Before irate mobs overran the prime minister's residence, she took off in a chopper.

So far, so disorganised. Since then, Sir Keir has experienced two headaches as a result of the occurrences.

One is diplomatic: in preparation for the upcoming elections, the UK must now try to get along with Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel peace laureate who is in charge of Bangladesh's interim administration. It's uncertain if Starmer's long-standing acquaintance with the recently overthrown tyrant will damage the relationship.

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.

‘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. 

Reporters have been unable to confirm whether Siddiq and her husband are paying market rent for a property typically valued at around £5,000 per month. This arrangement has enabled them, since 2022, to rent out a second flat in north London, where they previously resided.

Siddiq did not declare the income from this property to Parliamentary authorities for over a year, only doing so after reporters began investigating the matter.

The revelations do not stop there. Questions have also been raised about a third property in Hampstead, where Siddiq lived during the 2010s. This property is owned by her sister, Azmina, who once worked for Tony Blair, but it was reportedly given to her by Moin Ghani, a Bangladeshi lawyer who has represented Hasina’s government.

Siddiq’s mother, Rehana (and Hasina’s sister), resides in a property in Golders Green, north London, owned through an offshore trust by Shayan Rahman, the son of a billionaire politician and adviser to Hasina. Prior to this, Rehana lived in another property nearby, 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.

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 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.