Can someone gift the prime minister a designer spade? He wants to keep digging. If Keir Starmer were a celebrity, this week we’d be looking for the black hole in his publicist’s brain. Alas, these are mildly testing times for anyone who bought into the always ridiculous idea of No Drama Starmer. The prime minister has officially graduated into his Some Drama Starmer era, and – like all prime ministers ever – is on the ineluctable journey towards his All Drama Starmer era. This journey is of variable speed, of course – sometimes it takes 11 years, and sometimes it takes 44 days.
The PM is never going to be Loves the Drama Starmer, though, judging by his amusingly defensive response that it is basically essential for him to be by far and away parliament’s biggest receiver of hospitality and freebies, as well as being one half of the sort of couple on a combined salary of over two hundred grand who can’t buy their own clothes, and also a guy who has a weakness for multiple pairs of designer glasses. Forgive me – “luxury eyewear”, with a value of £2,485.
I sympathise with his football security issue but can’t quite keep a straight face over the hammy melodrama of the statement: “… never going to an Arsenal game again because I can’t accept hospitality is pushing it a bit far”. We could be mere days away from an explanation that accepting £4,000-worth of Taylor Swift tickets off the Premier League is a basic human right. (I’m afraid my reaction to the phrase “£698 of Coldplay tickets” is: how many thousand Coldplay tickets is that?)
Nor did Starmer completely nail the tone when addressing the full-spectrum briefing war currently being waged between his chief of staff, who now gets paid more than him and is fine with that; internal enemies of his chief of staff, who get paid less than they were expecting and are not fine with it; his senior adviser and political strategist; lesser spads; and – I think? – the cabinet secretary.
I’m finding the angles on this quite hard to keep up with, but the general vibe of his No 10 operation is the sort of snakepit you may expect to find in the Kuntsevo Dacha 15 minutes after Stalin was discovered on the shagpile. I would even go so far as to say it could rival a breakfast television studio. I had to forcefully press my challenge buzzer when I heard Starmer explain to BBC South East that he was “completely in control”. Oof. Once upon a time that was what Eamonn Holmes thought.
Moving on to the choice of donors, can we really judge a man by the man he lets smother him in high-end glasses? Let’s hope not. Lord Alli was ennobled by Tony Blair – who, until he became one of them, was always pathetically impressed with very rich people – and is now the purchaser of the Starmers’ wardrobes and arsenal of fancy specs. This latest piece of beneficence seems to have earned his lordship at least a temporary Downing Street security pass. As for the type of person we’re dealing with … listen, I don’t want to say Waheed Alli “divides opinion”, because you know what? This week I asked several people in the know about him to give their opinion and they all said the exactly same thing. Unfortunately, it’s a single word that we don’t use in the Guardian unless it’s in reported speech.
That all this should be taking place in the final weeks of a three-month scare buildup to the budget seems at best unfortunate, and surely something that either one’s chief of staff or political adviser or tailor should have spotted as a danger area. Even while he was wanging on about his corporate hospitality, Starmer was declining to discuss next month’s doom budget on the basis that, “I don’t want to risk putting the fear of God into people.”
Well, it’s a bit late for that. Labour took office and immediately declared things to be so dire that they were going to have to do awful and painful things to combat them – but will have left it three months before they finally explain what those awful and painful things are. This, as the former chief economist to the Bank of England Andy Haldane and many others have pointed out, has created a sense of “fear and foreboding and uncertainty among consumers, among businesses, and among investors”.
Truly the hat-trick. The current freebies row taking place during that particular information vacuum consequently feels even worse. It suggests that Starmer is a guy who talks to the public like an undertaker but in private likes the finer things in life. More than that, he feels entitled to them. That is no one’s favourite combination.
Having said that, I don’t think it’s the within-the-rules odour of impropriety that is the biggest problem for Starmer, although it is definitely a problem. Taking essential things away from those with not very much at all while giving the appearance of being perfectly happy to help yourself to luxuries is not a great look. But the much bigger vulnerability, in my appraisal, is that thing that maps on to what a lot of people are always, always prone to thinking about Labour: that they’re very free and easy when they’re spending other people’s money.
According to Ipsos polling in the FT today, half of British voters say they are disappointed in how Labour has governed so far, with Starmer’s approval ratings worse than those of any of his predecessors except Liz Truss. Considering that this comes more than a month before the doom-budget outlines their plans for our money, Starmer may find the next set of ratings well worth misplacing his many pairs of spectacles for.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
