Keir Starmer has declared more freebies than any of the other 649 MPs. (Image: Getty)
It’s not the freebies I mind, it’s the hypocrisy. For years, Labour MPs screeched about Tory sleaze, some of it real, some imagined. Now, without a blush, they tell us to focus on the big picture instead of the “tittle-tattle” about free clothes and Taylor Swift tickets.
Do they think we have forgotten, or do they genuinely believe it’s different when their side does it?
This was deputy PM three years ago: “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 the families facing £1,000 cuts to Universal Credit.”
Yet last week it emerged Ms Rayner had decided to hire her own vanity photographer on a salary of £68,000 – paid for by the taxpayer – while, to make the parallel exact, voting to take money from pensioners.
Three years ago the deputy PM gnashed her teeth about ’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 a Labour donor’s Manhattan penthouse, in a building with its own gym, jacuzzi and pool.
In 2022 Bridget Phillipson fulminated against Boris for “lavishly refurbishing Number 10 with a party donor’s money”.
But today, as Education Sec-retary, she says there was nothing wrong with getting a donor to pay for her birthday party, adding (with what she presumably imagined to be a winning smile) that anyone would accept free tickets to a Taylor Swift concert.
Now there is, in my view, nothing wrong with an MP accepting hospitality from a friend. The problem only arises if the “friend” turns out to be a lobbyist or a foreign government, which is why we require MPs to register their gifts.
In these cases there is no evidence of corruption. The Labour donor involved, Lord Alli, already has a peerage and plenty of money, and seems simply to have wanted to do his bit.
I am happy to accept the explanation that he was being generous to his mates. Or, rather, I would be if those mates had not been so determined to howl down such explanations in similar cases under the last government.
It’s the flagrancy of Labour’s one-rule-for-us arrogance that grates.
Here is Sir on the news that Boris’s chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, was to be paid £140,000: “When care workers and firefighters have been told they will get a pay freeze, how can the prime minister justify that?”
Here he is on his decision to pay his own chief of staff, Sue Gray, £170,000 (while, to repeat, taking money off pensioners): “I don’t believe that my staff should be the subject of public debate like this.”
Can he really not see the double standard?
It’s not his decision that bothers us so much as the way he slathers it with puritanical self-righteousness.
We are bothered less by the fact that Starmer has declared more freebies than any of the other 649 MPs than that he was accepting them at the same time as complaining about Tory greed. Like some angry, self-righteous teenager, Sir Keir has convinced himself that politics is not about trade-offs, but whether the country is run by goodies or baddies.
Had a Conservative minister accepted free accommodation on grounds that a child was doing exams, the Labour leader would have protested about out-of-touch ignoring deprived schools. We can just imagine what Ms Rayner would have had to say about what she once called the “absolute vile, banana republic, nasty, Etonian scum”.
The idea that Starmer might be open to similar criticism – some children, after all, will have their educations disrupted because their parents cannot afford his VAT charges – simply does not occur to Labour. They are the goodies, you see. Being the moral party, they can’t possibly be sleazy.
This is what will eventually bring the government down. Not sleaze as such, but the combination of sleaze with prissy finger-wagging.
It is only a matter of time.
Lord Hannan is a former Conservative MEP and president of the Institute for Free Trade.