After coasting his way to No. 10, Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership has got off to a pretty cursed start. Some of this wasn’t his fault, such as the Southport riots, and some has come from enacting policies that, while controversial, represent rational political choices, such as means-testing the winter fuel payment and early release of prisoners. But alongside these there has been a gradual piling up of missteps, miscalculations and unforced errors. The most headline-grabbing have involved the Prime Minister, his wife and the running of Downing Street.
Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership has got off to a pretty cursed start
The last five years of Tory government weren’t the only political gifts Sir Keir has been handed. In April, he declared £18,000 worth of clothing from Labour peer Lord Alli but failed to declare £5,000 in clothing, personal shopping and tailoring for his wife, Lady Starmer. His office is said to have been acting upon inaccurate advice and to have updated parliamentary authorities once the error became apparent. The parliamentary standards commissioner has declined to open an investigation into the rule breach. Coming on the heels of the news that Lord Alli, a major party donor, was handed a temporary pass to 10 Downing Street, it is, as the kids say, Not A Good Look.
The Prime Minister’s defence that ‘all Members of Parliament get gifts’ isn’t wrong, but it is more than a little tone deaf. Though perhaps not as much as his reasoning:
I’m a massive Arsenal fan. I can’t go into the stands because of security reasons. Therefore if I don’t accept a gift of hospitality I can’t go to a game. You could say, well, bad luck. That’s why gifts have to be registered. But you know, never going to an Arsenal game again because I can’t accept hospitality is pushing it a bit far.
Some might say that foregoing Arsenal games is a small price to pay to be prime minister. Some might even suggest that, if Sir Keir wants to attend football matches so badly, he could pay for hospitality out of his own not-so-small fortune.
This is why legalistic justifications – it’s within the rules, all MPs do it, the sums involved are small – don’t work in this case. The sums involved are relatively modest but that only underscores the problem: the Sir Keir and Lady Starmer can more than afford to pay for their own clothes or corporate treatment at the football. That they evidently don’t see things that way is a bit of a red flag. Tories are crowing about the Prime Minister’s troubles after years of sanctimony in opposition, where every infraction in No. 10 prompted a bluster of Sunday school moralising about decency, character and public service. They are right to an extent; you can’t present yourself as Mr Uphold-the-Dignity-of-the-Office then let party donors shower you and your missus with gifts.
But to see this as a story about hypocrisy is short-sighted. This is about entitlement. Entitlement in politics did not begin with the Starmers, nor with this government, but theirs is a very Labour sense of entitlement. Tory entitlement tends to come from a life gilded by privilege, of educational, career and social advancement hastened by money, class and connections. Entitled Tories see a ministerial career as a personal sacrifice, imposing strict limits and scrutiny on the advantages to which they are accustomed, and denying them the much higher earnings they believe they could command in the private sector. Labour entitlement can sometimes echo these sentiments but it can also take the form of a resentful idealism: they are trying to improve the country and all their critics and the public wants to do is fuss over a few quid on comforts and indulgences. They are supplying the bread, why shouldn’t they get to share in the roses?
I have a theory that scandals early on in a government’s lifespan are essentially consequence-free but they give some hints as to the more consequential scandals that might lie down the road. Tony Blair was only six months into his premiership when his government was hit by its first major sleaze row: the exemption of Formula One, whose then chief executive Bernie Ecclestone was a seven-figure Labour donor, from the new government’s ban on tobacco advertising. The Tories expected the row to tarnish Blair’s reputation as ‘a pretty straight sort of guy’ (that famed self-description originates with the Ecclestone furore) but the revelations made little impact and were long forgotten by the time of the next election. They did, however, clue us in on some of the personal and institutional flaws that would come to dog No. 10 in Blair’s later years, including proximity to millionaires, sofa government, a laxness about rules and processes, and Blair’s strained relationship with the truth.
No one will remember clothing gifts or No. 10 passes come the next election, which given Labour’s majority and the mesmerising uselessness of the Tories will be Sir Keir’s to lose. But just like the Ecclestone row these stories let us know what to watch out for, in this case entitlement, inattention to the rules, tin-eared messaging, and that familiar progressive credo: ‘It’s okay when we do it.’ If my theory is right, it is from these flaws that Sir Keir’s eventual downfall will come.
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