Gifts for grifters
Three months into office, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government has become a source of open-mouthed derision and anger. Labour politicians who spent much of the past several years excoriating the former Conservative government (rightly) for political sleaze, snouts in the trough, cash for access and so on have been revealed to have been behaving in the same way. There’s been outrage in particular over gifts of clothing, spectacles, tickets to sporting events and Taylor Swift concerts. The hypocrisy is off the scale, the political tin-ear even more so.
What’s even more astonishing — and instructive — is how these government ministers have been explaining their acceptance of these gifts. Here are a few examples.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson received £14,000 last year from Labour party donor and gay rights campaigner Lord Alli to fund two parties that Phillipson threw to celebrate her 40th birthday. She told Trevor Phillips on his Sky show, with knowing smiles:
I was turning 40 so I thought it was a good opportunity to get people together in a professional context. So it was journalists, trade unionists, education people, MPs and shadow cabinet. Second event was an event I held also for lobby journalists, people in the education world as part of a reception. It was in a work context.
Phillips remarked:
That’s a very nice thing, but if a Tory had done that years ago I know exactly what you’d be saying to me this morning: they should pay for their own birthday parties.
Phillipson repeated that these two birthday parties were “in a work context”. To which Phillips observed:
I think you might be digging an even bigger hole here. You’ve got a lot of people who knew you might be the education secretary, and you’ve got them in a room — you’re paying for them to lobby you.
To which she shook her head in apparent mystification, saying:
No, no, that’s absolutely not what it was. This was an opportunity for people to come gather, to have a reception where we can talk about for example issues around education.
Given the areas to which her “work context” has apparently expanded, can there ever have been such an assiduous government minister? Phillipson explains here, for example, why she accepted free tickets to the Wimbledon tennis tournament:
I was invited [to Wimbledon] as education secretary. Shadow ministers are often given such invitations and government ministers are often given such invitations. It was declared; I appreciate it was a privilege to be there but I was very much there in my role as education secretary.
So not only did she attend her own 40th birthday party (twice) as Education Secretary, but she also went to watch the tennis at Wimbledon in her role as Education Secretary. Who knew tennis and birthdays were so essential to education!
And what about her further acceptance of tickets to a Taylor Swift concert? Said Phillipson:
Look, I'll be honest, it was a hard one to turn down. I appreciate there was big demand for the tickets. It was a privilege to be there. One of my children was keen to go along. It's hard to say no if you're offered tickets in those circumstances.
A “privilege”? Others might call it something else. Perhaps someone might teach the Education Secretary that it’s not hard to say no to a bribe. But she’s presumably too busy hiding behind her child to listen.
Here’s the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves — the steward of Britain’s finances — justifying her acceptance of £7,500 of funding for clothing from a friend, Juliet Rosenfeld. In an interview with the BBC, Reeves described Ms Rosenfeld as “an old friend” who wanted to support her work as shadow chancellor. The donations made “a big difference,” helping her “look smart for big events and the campaign trail,” Reeves said, although she admitted she understood that it “looks a bit odd”.
She told LBC:
Politics relies on donations for us to be able to do our jobs. The alternative is asking taxpayers to fund our election campaigns and I don’t think that would be appropriate.
Eh? Politicians don’t need expensive clothes to be able to do their jobs. The alternative is not to get taxpayers to pay for this stuff but for politicians to buy their clothes themselves. Does the Chancellor of the Exchequer really need this elementary lesson in how to manage one’s work-income balance? Apparently so.
The Prime Minister himself, Sir Keir Starmer, accepted almost 40 sets of free tickets during his time as Labour opposition leader, mostly for football matches but also £4,000 of hospitality at a Taylor Swift concert and £698-worth of Coldplay tickets in Manchester. Lord Alli paid for Starmer’s work clothing worth £16,200 and spectacles valued at £2,485 while Lady Starmer received £5,000 worth of clothing and personal shopping.
The Telegraph reports today:
Sir Keir Starmer has defended taking free football tickets and accommodation because they were important for his son.
Earlier this month, The Telegraph reported that Sir Keir repeatedly used an £18 million penthouse owned by Labour peer Lord Alli while campaigning to enter No 10.
The Prime Minister has been dogged by questions about donations that he has accepted for clothing and tickets to football matches and concerts. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “My boy, 16, was in the middle of his GCSEs. I made him a promise, a promise that he would be able to get to his school, do his exams, without being disturbed.
“We have lots of journalists outside our house where we live and I’m not complaining about that, that’s fine. But if you’re a 16-year-old trying to do your GCSEs and it’s your one chance in life... I promised him we would move somewhere, get out of the house and go somewhere where he could be peacefully studying. “Somebody then offered me accommodation where we could do that. I took that up and it was the right thing to do.”
The Prime Minister also said that he had to accept free tickets to Arsenal football matches so that he can keep attending games with his son.
So just like Reeves, Starmer is also using his child as an excuse. He implies that he had no alternative but to accept all these freebies. This is absurd. Why couldn’t he have rented a room for his son out of his own considerable salary? And he didn’t have to accept free tickets to watch the football with his son. He chose to. Such distinctions don’t seem to have occurred to him.
Other ministers have suggested, yet more preposterously, that accepting freebies is what politicians are supposed to do. The Guardian reported that the Business Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds told Times Radio that accepting hospitality “is not a perk of the job, it’s part of the job”. He said:
People want to engage with decision-makers. They want to ask you to be aware of what they are doing. Again, I think we have the right rules on transparency in relation to that. But this is about the job that we do and the need to be engaged with the sectors that we cover.
“Engaged with the sectors that we cover”? This isn’t about ministers discussing policy issues with interested parties. This is about perks and freebies designed to curry influence with government.
After the general election, Alli was temporarily and inexplicably given a No 10 pass which is normally reserved for civil servants and political advisers. It’s been reported that the pass was authorised by Starmer’s all-powerful chief of staff, Sue Gray — Whitehall’s former head of ethics, no less — after Alli donated £10,000 to the Beckenham and Penge constituency party of Sue Gray’s son, Liam Conlon, who won that seat in July’s general election.
Starmer, Reeves, Phillipson et all maintain that they’ve done nothing wrong because they’ve acted within the rules. Well, it’s true there are no parliamentary rules against being greedy, grasping, shifty, hypocritical and also cowardly in trying to use their children as human shields against criticism — but this is still behaviour that doesn’t pass the smell test.
And when people have given government ministers gifts of expensive clothing or spectacles or costly tickets to events that are out of reach for the vast majority of people, the idea being pushed by these ministers that this was out of the goodness of these donors’ hearts because they really, really wanted to see the Prime Minister in fancy spectacles or his wife in a nice frock — and that they didn’t seek political favours down the line or access to power or a commitment to implement their own particular agendas, good grief, no! — is frankly an insult to the public’s intelligence.
What’s perhaps most striking of all is these ministers’ sense of entitlement to behave in this way — and to feel perfectly fine about it. Their mantra seems to be that, when the Tories had their snouts in the trough, this was very bad because the Tories are very bad people. When Labour people have their own snouts in the trough, it’s good because Labour people are very good.
It’s the familiar left-wing mantra— leftists are moral and good, anyone who opposes them is evil, all who oppose them are right-wing, all right-wing people are evil, so anything right-wing people do is bad and anything left-wing people do is good. Even if it’s the same behaviour. Indeed, left-wing people are so pure and so good that cronyism, cash for access and all the rest of this unsavoury collusion are a positive virtue.
This is why the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, jaw-droppingly told BBC Newsnight:
I'm really proud of people who want to contribute not just their time and volunteering but their money to our politics. It is a noble pursuit, just like giving to charity. And we don't recognise that enough.
Starmer once said that if the Labour party isn’t a moral project, it is nothing. He and his ministers have now told us that morality is whatever is in their own self-interest. Where the Labour party once stood is now empty space through which blow the cold winds of self-regard.