Who’d be an MP now?

Sir Keir Starmer offered a sausage to fortune when he let Lord Alli bankroll half the cabinet. One’s heart does not bleed for those ministers assailed for taking his gifts in cash and kind. They have spent the last few years being mercilessly sanctimonious. But their plight does confirm that being a Member of Parliament has become an ever more disagreeable life and is therefore pursued by people ever less representative of the population. The traditional compensation for MPs’ relatively low salaries was a) some freedom to earn money elsewhere and b) respect. Both have dramatically diminished. Deference meant, for example, that few dared disturb their MP at home at a weekend. Now constituents literally ring them up and demand they unblock their drains (I have been witness to this). It was considered the duty of the wealthy man – or sometimes of a wealthy organisation, such as a trade union – to help MPs materially. This was liable to corruption, but it is not fundamentally a corrupt idea. It is much better that politicians should be assisted by well-disposed citizens than dependent on state handouts. When the staggeringly rich Philip Sassoon became an MP, Churchill purred: ‘A Pullman car has joined the train.’ Lord Alli, with his free frocks, suits and spectacles, his London penthouse, New York flat, and lavish parties in Kent, is Labour’s 21st-century Pullman. Even today, things are worse for women MPs. They are minutely judged on their looks, which therefore require the right clothes, make-up, bags, shoes and hair. They often lack the money and also, especially with young children, the time. They need help.

One charge against Lord Alli is that he was instrumental in ensuring that many scores of the ‘right’, pliable Labour candidates were selected for winnable seats by seconding to Labour a member of his staff, Matt Faulding, to take charge.