The public response to Sir Keir Starmer and his ministers accepting gifts from Labour donors and others has been what you might expect: rhymes with ‘snouts in the trough’. However, popular indignation is not universal and there is a cohort who are outraged by the outrage. They believe the real villainy lies not with ministers taking gifts or the system that permits it but with the news media for reporting on these matters. That this elite backlash is concentrated among a commentariat that wrung every last drop of scandal out of the Tories’ last few years in office only makes it more delicious. Governments must be held to account. No, not that one!
One prominent commentator decries a ‘made-up Starmer scandal’ that is ‘even more preposterous than those which came before it’. He refers to the news that Sir Keir’s family decamped to an apartment owned by Labour donor Lord Alli during the general election, a gift worth more than £20,000. The Prime Minister told the BBC he had promised his son ‘an environment in which he could calmly get on, his one chance to do his GCSEs’. The scandals that came before this one included the Labour leader initially failing to declare £5,000 in clothing and personal shopping for his wife from Lord Alli, who has donated more than £16,000 in clothing to Sir Keir, and who was temporarily given an unrestricted access pass to No. 10 following the election.
Another progressive commentator accuses journalists reporting on freebies of ‘amplifying, building, confecting outrage’ and predicts that ‘in a year, they’ll all be hand-wringing about “the rise of the far right” and writing think-pieces on how it could possibly have happened’. The same pundit wonders ‘whether the story would have had quite as much purchase, if the donor was called John Smith, Anthony Bamford, or Frank Hester’, adding that ‘a lot of journalists seem to love saying that Labour took money from a man called Waheed Alli, over and over again’. He suggests ‘Leveson 2’ as the solution.
A third insists that ‘borrowing a flat to give your kid a chance to revise for their GCSEs is not akin to borrowing a villa on a luxury private island for a private holiday,’ a reference to a 2019 holiday taken by Boris and Carrie Johnson at the Mustique home of Tory donor David Ross.
I struggle to get worked up about designer clothes, posh flats and hospitality at Arsenal, but the reason people are getting worked up has less to do with journalists than it does with the man at the centre of these stories. It was Sir Keir who chose to strap on a hair-shirt for the past five years and inveigh against the sin and corruption of the previous government with priestly piety. This ethics and integrity strategy helped make him prime minister, for the country was so very fed up with Tory sleaze. But it also established a standard by which Sir Keir would inevitably be judged, albeit few thought this would happen so soon.
As I wrote on Coffee House last week, the appearance of hypocrisy never goes down well with the voters but the larger problem is one of entitlement. If Sir Keir and Lady Starmer wanted new clothes or hospitality at Arsenal, they could have easily afforded it. We know this because Sir Keir says his family initially set money aside to pay for alternative accommodation during the election, a significant expense. Had the Starmers simply paid their own way, none of these stories would exist today. Had Sir Keir had better political instincts, he would have understood how these gifts from a Labour donor would have been perceived by voters. (More than two-thirds of Britons say the Prime Minister should not accept gifts from private individuals.)
They ought to be walking on air right now
That is not, as the Starmerbros seem to believe, because an all-powerful right-wing press is making the public think these things. The percentage of Britons who get their information from newspapers is in precipitous decline, while seven in ten rely on television or online, two sectors not exactly known for their conservative outlook. No, the public doesn’t like politicians getting freebies because the public doesn’t like politicians. If it were up to them, MPs would be paid the minimum wage, forced to live in a shoe and made to walk barefoot from their constituency to Westminster every week. I think MPs should be paid more and able to receive gifts from anyone they’re not regulating or giving public money to, but I am in the minority. If you want to be prime minister, and you intend to get there by contrasting your public service with your opponents’ self-service, there are certain things you cannot do. Accepting gifts from a donor who goes on to receive a security pass to No. 10 is one of them.
That is the difficulty that Sir Keir’s outriders in the commentariat are experiencing. They spent years demanding the most intense media scrutiny for the Tories but resent even the mildest accountability for Labour. This is leaving them embittered just months into the tenure of a government broadly to their taste and with an eye-watering majority. They ought to be walking on air right now, not rage-tweeting against a press that has almost no power anymore. How much happier they would be if they simply said: we are the good guys, they are the bad guys; they should be scrutinised, we shouldn’t. There’s no shame in partisanship, and it’s hardly unique to the centre-left.
They can’t bring themselves to do this because it would involve admitting that they are ideological. Few tenets are as intrinsic to progressive self-mythology as the belief that their politics are not really politics but empirical truth arrived at through reason and empathy. Acknowledging that their principles evolve in line with political circumstances would feel like a great weight off their shoulders but it would be a tacit admission that others have the right to do the same. That politics is merely a contest over interests, not virtue.
Progressives cannot countenance that any more than they can countenance being held to the standards they set for their opponents. It offends the basic credo of progressivism: it’s okay when we do it because we are okay sort of people.
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