Should have gone to Specsavers. You don’t need £2,435-worth of designer glasses to see how corrosive it is to the government when the media, traditional and social, is filled with snickering stories and scornful commentaries about who paid for the prime minister’s “luxury” eyewear and his wife’s frocks. That’s not what the Labour leader should want as a big topic of conversation at any time and certainly not in the run-up to his party conference. Nor would you want a nasty rash of stories, sourced to leaks from disgruntled personalities within government, about the salary being paid to Number 10’s chief of staff, one of the accusations being that she spurned advice not to accept more than the prime minister himself. Those who cackle that Sue Gray is the only pensioner to have been made better off by this government have come up with a joke that wounds.
To use a phrase popular among spin doctors, “the optics” of all this are awful. They are particularly bad given that the prime minister has spent so much of his time since he came to office alternately telling everyone that his will be a purer-than-pure “government of service” and that the immediate future for the country is one of tough decisions during which things will get worse before they get better. One Labour veteran, who has known and been supportive of Sir Keir for years, remarks: “The freebies suggest we’re out of touch and no different to the Tories. None of this is disastrous – these are early days – but it is damaging. It will become a defining part of the political character of Keir if he’s not careful.” Another influential Labour figure groans: “Everyone who wants the government to succeed is in despair.”
This is in part because the freebies saga has run for days and days because Number 10 couldn’t find a way to take the heat out of it. Only after the revelation that Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves are among other members of Labour’s top team to have had their wardrobes funded did Labour cave in to pressure and declare that it would not accept clothes as gifts in the future. In the interview with him that we publish today, the prime minister musters a defence that some will find reasonable for his acceptance of corporate hospitality at football matches. He’d rather watch his beloved Arsenal from the stands as he used to, he protests, but security considerations are the issue. Even voters who might have some sympathy for that argument are likely to remain troubled by the acceptance of so many other freebies that Sir Keir declared, in excess of £100,000 worth of gifts in the last parliament, more than any other MP.
I hear the prime minister’s defenders in the cabinet and at Number 10 protest that there’s not a scintilla of a suggestion of corruption about any of this and these stories are being blown up out of all proportion to their intrinsic importance by a rightwing media salivating to get its teeth into a Labour PM. Even if you accept that it may have a point, here’s the problem with that defence. The rightwing media is not going away. So the answer is not to behave in any fashion that supplies the enemy with ammunition to fire at you. And when voters already have an extremely jaundiced opinion of politicians, best not to do anything that is hard to reconcile with your claimed ambition to rebuild public trust. There’s no good answer to the question likely to be asked by the typical voter: why doesn’t the prime minister pay for his own suits and Coldplay tickets? After a succession of ministers had been made to squirm trying to defend Sir Keir, Harriet Harman, the former Labour deputy leader, offered sensible advice when she said that “trying to justify it is making things worse” and the wise course would be to say no to any more freebies.
When I put that to him during our interview, the prime minister refused to agree and made the case that he and his government will ultimately be judged not by how many Taylor Swift tickets he’s been given, but whether they have boosted the economy, fixed the NHS and delivered all the other improvements they have promised. True enough. But one of the effects of the freebies saga is to make it harder work delivering change because this kind of stuff distracts the energies of the government and undermines public confidence in it while sapping the ability of Sir Keir to convey his case to the country. When he makes his set-piece speech this week, the first by a Labour prime minister to a Labour conference in 15 years, he wants any watching voter to be persuaded that the government has a plan worth supporting to rebuild Britain. He doesn’t want them thinking: “I wonder how much that suit cost and who paid for it?”
The leaks pouring out of Number 10 are another self-inflicted wound. It is never a bright idea to generate headlines that remind voters that senior people at Number 10 earn a great deal more money than the median member of the electorate. The perils of politicians and senior aides advertising that they have privileged lifestyles ought not to be lost on Sir Keir. How he used to mock Rishi Sunak’s penchant for looking down on the country from a helicopter. Even if Ms Gray is worth £170,000 a year for what she brings to the government, it is a very bad idea to shove that down people’s throats. “Number 10 needs sorting out, and quickly” is the blunt verdict of a senior Labour MP who chairs a select committee. It was Sir Keir’s personal pitch to the public that they could expect effective and harmonious government from him because his party was a unified one and he knew how to run a large organisation. “Mr Rules” was part of his brand. “Sir Competent” was supposed to be another. The days of fratricidal conflict within government were supposed to have ended with the departure of the Tories. When you’ve got a cash-strapped country to renew, bickering about which Downing Street staffer is being paid what and squabbling about who sits where in Number 10 is extremely unedifying. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Starmer Downing Street has become seriously dysfunctional very early in its life. In our interview, he acknowledges that the leaking is “damaging” the government. There is only one person who can put a stop to it. He sees that person every day when he looks in his shaving mirror.
Thoughtful members of the government attribute the prominence being given to stories about freebie-taking and faction-fighting to another factor. “We’re not getting up enough of a narrative about what we stand for,” says one. “The consequence of not having a strong narrative is that other stories fill out the picture.”
The conference will hear ministers boast about all the things that they have done since the election. What’s lacking is a compelling account that binds it all together. The government’s two principal storytellers are the prime minister and the chancellor, who address the conference on successive days. The tale they’ve told since the election has been one of woe, most notably in the “winter is coming” speech delivered by the prime minister at the end of August. Anyone with an ounce of political nous sees the logic in hanging the baleful legacy from the Conservatives around the Tories’ neck and depicting Labour’s mission as a massive job of renewal that is going to take a decade. Even among ministers who completely get this, there’s concern that the doom and gloom has been laid on so thick that it is casting a pall over consumer and business confidence while draining public support for Labour. Several members of the cabinet have told me that there needs to be, in the words of one of them, “more about the sunny uplands” at the conference from the prime minister and the chancellor. If you are telling voters that the journey is going to be a painful one, you must also be able to persuade people that it is going to be worth it because the ultimate destination is appealing.
To keep his party and the country with him, the Labour leader’s job at the conference is to persuade both audiences that sacrifice today will be rewarded with a much better Britain in the future. That demands a speech that offers some uplift, inspiration and hope, some of “the vision thing”. And by that I definitely do not mean that he should get himself another pair of free designer spectacles.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
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