Keir Starmer and his wife don’t need a personal shopper

Well, colour me disappointed. I was among those – mugs, the uncharitable will be quick to call them – who imagined that Sir Keir Starmer represented the arrival of a welcome period of dull, unshowy decency at the top of our politics.

I thought that whatever else he did – disappointed the left; enraged the right; made ‘hard decisions’ that nobody liked – it would be a long time before he was caught making chiselling excuses for accepting freebies, or rewarding donors with favours. His background as a lawyer, his punctilious attention to detail, that whole stiff air of priggishness he brought with him from the campaign trail to Downing Street: these may not have been attractive qualities, may not have been qualities that enhanced his personal charisma (as Boris’s obvious roguishness enhanced his), but they were ones to be respected.

Little is so corrosive to our democracy as the idea that ‘they’re all the same’ or ‘they’re only in it for themselves’

Has Starmer been so quick to have his head turned by the trappings of office? So naïve as to imagine nobody will sweat the small stuff? Yet here we are. First he dishes out a Number 10 security pass to the largest personal donor to his campaign, without providing any satisfactory explanation. Then we discover that same donor has forked out the thick end of £20,000 to Sir Keir in clothes and spectacles alone (how many pairs of glasses does one man need?). Same again on accommodation during the election. Same again on ‘private office costs’. 

Sir Keir took £76,000 worth of freebies, according to the Sunday Times, between 2019 and July 2024 – more than almost any other MP.

Yesterday it further emerged that in addition to all this – and without it being declared in the Register of Members’ Interests – Lord Alli has been buying fancy frocks for Lady Starmer too; and supplying her with the services, what’s more, of a ‘personal shopper’. A personal bleeding shopper? Those of us who came to Sir Keir with something like an open mind imagined that he would treat high office as a solemn responsibility and an opportunity to serve and not as the sort of trolley-dash through Selfridges they used to offer as a prize in a 1980s TV game-show.

Perhaps there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Perhaps this story is just another example of A Smear By The Evil Right Wing Press. And perhaps the Evil Right Wing Press are indeed out to get him. But even if so, you’d think a leader with the smallest ounce of common sense, let alone integrity, wouldn’t go about making it so laughably easy for them.

Sir Keir and Lady Starmer live rent free in Downing Street. They earn an estimated £200,000 a year between them – about six times the UK’s median salary. Did it not occur to either of them that it might be best to play it safe and reach into their own pockets to pay for their personal shopper – particularly while Sir Keir was asking everyone for sympathy on his ‘tough decisions’ about winter fuel for pensioners?

Instead, we get exactly the sort of shifty, mealy-mouthed excuses for breaking the code of conduct that some of us had hoped we’d heard the last of with the departure of the previous government. Number 10’s spokesman is quoted saying: ‘We sought advice from the authorities on coming to office. We believed we had been compliant, however following further interrogation this month, we have declared further items.’ Regrettable administrative oversight, honest mistake made in good faith, correcting the record, all done through proper channels…blah blah.

If only there had been some example in recent memory – or what people in his trade would call a precedent – that would have concentrated his mind. A Prime Minister whose reluctance to reach into his own pockets and appetite for, say, freebie holidays, gold wallpaper and three grand drinks trolleys had become a national joke – and had afforded the then Labour leader (one K Starmer) to pose mockingly in the wallpaper department of John Lewis. 

As many people (among them one K Starmer) have piously but correctly observed, little is so corrosive to our democracy as the idea that ‘they’re all the same’ or ‘they’re only in it for themselves’. Sir Keir made it, indeed, his mission to ‘restore trust in politics’. And yet intoxicated by the first whiff of some free goodies, as most onlookers will see it, he hurls himself and his government’s reputation into a gaping political elephant-trap.

One of Sir Keir’s great predecessors as Labour leader was Harold Wilson. As his ‘lavender list’ of resignation honours indicated, Wilson had no trouble cosying up to rich businessmen. But during his time in office he did a shrewd job of managing his image, as any half sensible political operator would. In private, he loved a cigar; but he was never photographed in public smoking anything less proletarian than a pipe. Sir Keir has only been in office for a couple of months and already he’s puffing on his stogie in public. What a prize plum.