Burnham attacks Davis over ‘late-night’ calls

There were raised eyebrows in Westminster today when Culture Minister Andy Burnham questioned David Davis's "late-night" phone calls with Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, the civil rights campaign group which, like Davis, fiercely opposes the controversial extension of pre-charge detention to 42 days for terror suspects. In an interview with Progress, a Labour magazine, Burnham also said Davis should be made to pick up the entire cost of the by-election he has forced in Haltemprice and Howden by retiring from the Tory front bench - reckoned to be in the order of £80,000.

"I think there's a bloody good case to be made for it," Burnham told Progress. "Why should the resources at local level and national level be devoted to this? Why? The more I think about this thing, the more it staggers me as an outrageous act of arrogance." He added: "I actually feel it's fairly insulting to his electorate because it's basically saying: 'I'm going to use 70,000 people in my national stunt.' They're not there to be used in that way."

But Burnham didn't stop there. Taking a swipe at Davis's friendship with 39-year-old Chakrabarti, he said he was exasperated with those people "seduced" by Davis's liberal credentials, and said he found something "very curious in the man who was, and still is I believe, an exponent of capital punishment, having late-night, hand-wringing, heart-melting phone calls with Shami Chakrabarti."

"We haven't heard the end of this," one Westminster insider told The First Post on Wednesday. ·