Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
“In my beginning is my end”, wrote TS Eliot; and he might as well have had Sir Keir Starmer’s administration specifically in mind. We can already see how Labour is going fall.
Not from sleaze, exactly; but from self-righteousness, double standards and the belief that its peccadilloes are justified by some higher cause. Labour ministers will be dragged down, not by Ozwald Boateng suits or Gucci handbags, but by the prim, prissy puritanism with which they clothe themselves.
Three years ago, Angela Rayner raged thus at Boris Johnson: “Instead of spending more taxpayers’ money on more photographers for the sake of his own vanity, the Prime Minister should prioritise feeding the children who will go hungry in half term next week and families facing £1,000 cuts to Universal Credit.”
Now, she has decided to hire her own vanity photographer on a salary of £68,000, paid by the taxpayer – while, to make the parallel exact, voting to take money from pensioners.
Three years ago, the deputy PM sermonised about Boris’s Caribbean break: “The public have a right to know who paid for his luxury holiday, how much they paid for it, and what they might expect in return for their generosity.”
At the start of this year, she accepted a free stay in Waheed Alli’s Manhattan penthouse, in a building with its own gym, jacuzzi and pool.
In 2022, her colleague Bridget Phillipson took the obligatory high moral tone against the then PM for “lavishly refurbishing Number 10 with a party donor’s money”.
Today, the Education Secretary says that she there was nothing wrong with getting a donor to pay for her birthday party, and that anyone in her position would have accepted free tickets to a Taylor Swift concert.
She genuinely thinks it’s OK when her side does it.
To repeat, it’s not the freebies, it’s the hypocrisy.
I will part ways with some readers here, but I don’t see a problem with inviting a friend on holiday or to a concert. As this column never ceases to argue, the same rules should apply to MPs as to everyone else (when they don’t, it is usually in the opposite way to what most people imagine).
There is nothing wrong with an MP accepting hospitality from a friend. The problem comes if the donor is not a friend, but an interest group wanting favours in return. That is why we have the rules we do, requiring MPs come clean about gifts. The rest of us can then determine whether the donor is unsuitable (an unfriendly government, say) or whether the MPs in question has done things in return that they otherwise would not have done.
In the cases that have recently come to light, there is no evidence of corruption. No quid pro quo seems to have been expected. The Labour donor involved, Lord Alli, already has a peerage and plenty of money, and has no obvious axe to grind.
I am happy to accept the explanation that he was being generous to friends.
Or, rather, I would be if those friends had not been so determined to howl down such explanations in equivalent cases under the last government. Indeed, arguably not even equivalent cases, since the refurbishment of Downing Street was an example, not of state resources being used to benefit private interests, but of the precise opposite – a private donor doing up a government asset, thereby sparing the taxpayer.
When Labour now tells us to be grown up, to look at the big picture, to ignore the tittle-tattle, it invites ridicule. This is the party that spent two years ignoring almost every policy issue to concentrate on getting Boris Johnson out of office over wallpaper and cake.
The problem is not Sir Keir’s decision to pay Sue Grey more than he earns as PM; it’s the way he tore into a lower salary for Dominic Cummings. It’s not the fact that he has declared more freebies than any of the other 649 MPs. It’s not even his tortured plea that as an Arsenal fan, he could hardly be expected not to attend games.
No, it’s that we all know what his reaction would have been had Rishi Sunak been the freebiemeister. It’s that, even while he was fulminating against Tory sleaze, he was simultaneously being (to quote East Croker again) “endowed by the ruined millionaire”.
The PM believes that, while Tories who take gifts are sleazy, Labour is intrinsically moral. Like a teenager, he has convinced himself that politics is not about trade-offs or clashing priorities, but about whether the country is run by goodies or baddies.
Hence his sulkiness over the need for spending constraints as he discovers, in office, that the problem was not Tory sadism but the fact that we ran out of money because of lockdown. Hence his determination to scrap the Rwanda scheme, and subsequent scramble to find something to put in its place, as he realises that it had been adopted for a reason. Hence the general air of amateurishness and unpreparedness that has defined his first three months.
Yup, Eliot had his number alright. “What we call the beginning is often the end”.
