Well, well, well. Off the back of his thumping majority, Sir Keir Starmer has been making good use of the perks of being premier. Given Labour’s long history of bashing Rishi Sunak for flying private, one might have thought that the fleet of government jets at their disposal would be stowed away in a hanger. That’s not quite the case…
The Starmer army attitude towards private planes has changed quite significantly over the past year. At Labour’s party conference in October, Rachel Reeves criticised Sunak for his ‘private jet habit’, pledging to enforce tighter rules on ministerial use of private jets under a Labour government. In January, Angela Rayner accused Sunak of ‘jetting around the country on taxpayers’ money like an A-list celeb’ after he took a 36 minute flight from London to Middlesborough and a 45-minute flight from London to Blackpool. Sir Keir slammed Sunak for the trips, adding that ‘the view on the ground is very different to that from his private jet’. The Labour party were so keen to pursue this line of attack that it even posted this jibe on Twitter:
But less than a year ago, according to Flight Radar, Sir Keir was lucky to bag the window seat on his Ryanair flight to Estonia with then-shadow minister John Healey. Fast forward less than seven months, and Sir Keir has ascended from budget airline to joyriding a Dassault Falcon 900LX around the four nations on his victory parade. In May, just a few days after barbing Sunak at PMQs – remarking about the ex-PM ‘I’ve prosecuted more people smugglers than he’s had helicopter rides’ – Sir Keir took a private flight from Wales to Scotland.
‘We have to use the most efficient form of transport in the middle of a very busy general election campaign,’ said Starmer on the defensive. But even post-campaign, after the Labour leader had whipped round the UK to thank his supporters, the Falcon flew from RAF Northolt to RAF Brize Norton on 9 July, airborne for just 21 minutes. It then whizzed now-defence secretary John Healey to and from Washington while Starmer made the transatlantic trip, er, separately on the Airbus A321 later that day. Couldn’t have shared could you, chaps?
And last Sunday both the Falcon and Airbus flew to and from the Euros final in Berlin. Using a private jet for a football match would have been an open goal for Starmer to have taken a shot at Sunak just a few months ago. How the tables turn. And Mr S has calculated that in total, there have been over 25 private flights taken by Starmer’s army already. During his first seven months as PM, Sunak took a government jet once every eight days. At this rate, Sir Keir’s lefty lot look set to cruise past that number. Rules for thee but not for me…
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