‘Ministers used private emails’ is the kind of absurdity that gave us President Trump

The farrago of nothing about Hillary Clinton’s emails may have lost her the election. John Rentoul says Labour shouldn’t pursue that nonsense here

Hillary Clinton, not checking her emails (AFP/Getty)

Should Labour be engaged in the sort of politics that gave us President Trump? For months US journalists ran huge stories about how Hillary Clinton, when she was Barack Obama’s secretary of state, used her personal email account for government business. The FBI investigated, found nothing wrong, and then Jim Comey, its director, reported – two weeks before the 2016 election – that his staff had found another cache of emails that needed to be investigated. Two days before the election, he announced there was nothing suspicious in them either.

The damage was done. I don’t know if Clinton would have beaten Trump if Comey had kept quiet, but the result was so close that anything could have tipped it. The fuss about her emails was so disproportionate that it cut through to voters, giving an impression that something untoward had been going on and was being covered up.

This is exactly the miasma of misunderstanding that Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, is trying to conjure up with her campaign to “demand the truth on private email use”. Labour has seized on apparently contradictory statements by ministers and the prime minister’s spokesperson, and linked the use of personal email accounts to corners being cut in emergency coronavirus procurement, to suggest there is something shady going on.