Sir Keir Starmer is off to New York and all but the party nerds are drifting away from Liverpool and the Labour party conference. The good news for the PM is that hardly anyone is around for the union debate about the winter fuel payment; the bad is that he’s still dogged by his very own donations scandal. His post conference interview should have been about the global crisis unfolding in Lebanon but he had to take the time to explain away another donation from Lord Alli, this time about the use of one of his homes for young Starmer to revise for GCSEs.
“It was the right thing to do. It didn’t cost the taxpayer a penny”, he said. Except it happened to be a gift of the same man who paid for Lady Starner’s frocks, for Sir Keir’s suits and specs and for Deputy PM Angela Rayner’s striking outfits. On the moral compass register, you can’t imagine Gordon Brown, Presbyterian minister’s son, doing it.
It is however, what you can imagine Boris Johnson’s wife Carrie, doing. And that’s the problem. The Tories did not have a monopoly on being up for donations and hospitality — Tony and Cherie Blair famously enjoyed the hospitality of Sir Richard Branson — but we thought, and more fool us, that whatever else they were, Starmer and his team were upright; in opposition, Angela Rayner didn’t spare Boris Johnson. Labour, she said, “would stamp out the corruption” that characterised him.
Well, even before the election we had the row about how many homes she had. A month after it we find the Deputy PM declaring that she was “overly transparent” about using a Manhattan apartment of Lord Alli’s for her holidays, and transparent too about the gifts of clothes. Transparent about being on the take from rich people?
Angela Rayner makes a lot of being working class. In fact when those grisly images came back from Ibiza this summer of Ange in a rave, she said it was because she was working class, and the working classes like to party. No, Ange; we’re conflating two things here. There are your personal proclivities and there are the attributes of the working class and they’re not the same. In fact, the Deputy PM is getting away with murder on the back of her self-description as working class. It’s a way of seeing off criticism of her personal judgment as class-based snobbiness.
It’s time I think to cut Ange a bit less slack by virtue of her tough origins – and they were tough
Well, I happen to be rather closely acquainted with the working class — the old fashioned, respectable sort — and can I just say that freeloading is not a working class characteristic, not necessarily. In fact the old fashioned trades unionists who still knock around the fringes of the Labour movement, would way rather she bought her frocks from her local boutique than swan around in plumage bought by Lord Alli. John Major, probably the last genuinely working class PM, was famously unglamorous, but it was part of his appeal. And he’d never have called his political opponents “scum” like she did. Being working class isn’t synonymous with being rude.
It’s time I think to cut Ange a bit less slack by virtue of her tough origins – and they were tough. I can’t be alone in being angry that this woman is in charge of housing, or to put it another way, in charge of the imposition of housing on areas where there might be local opposition to it for very good reason. It was dreadful, not surprising, that she dropped the requirement that beauty should be a consideration when it came to new developments.
She’s right that the term is subjective but crass in not even trying to aspire to it. And given she probably can’t, she shouldn’t be in that job. Jon Cruddas, one of the party’s old school, took her to task for not even trying to give working people a beautiful built environment, the way William Morris sought to do. That’s an actual Labour tradition, not trying to pretend that worrying about aesthetics, about respecting the historic character of English counties, is somehow effete. She should be made to read Jon Cruddas’s essay for Policy Exchange.
The donations scandal has tainted Labour before it’s even started to do things. It matters because it’s at odds with the way we perceived the PM, and if we had any illusions about his Deputy, we don’t now. They don’t deserve a break because they are – in the case of Angela Rayner – or their parents – Starmer – working class. Rather, it’s another reason for voters to feel let down.
