During the last election campaign it was hard to escape the impression that, whatever his other faults, Rishi Sunak just wasn’t very good at politics. The charge sheet included getting drenched announcing the election and leaving D-day veterans on the beaches. And insisting that black was white: that he was stopping the boats, that the economy was in good shape, that the Tories were on course for victory.
Just a couple of months later, it very much feels like Keir Starmer and Labour are saying: “Hold my beer.” Keen to prove that they, too, are amateurs at the political PR game. It’s almost as if there is something about being in government that makes fools of everyone. Though few would have imagined that Labour could manage it quite so quickly. A period of grace would have been more fitting.
Take the freebies. And Keir has. The Arsenal tickets. The Taylor Swift tickets. The suits. The designer glasses. The clothes for his wife. Starmer’s big shtick was that he was going to do politics differently. The antidote to Tory corruption and scandal. A man who could be trusted. He was one of us. So why put himself in a position where you can so easily be criticised by the rightwing press?
If you want to set yourself up as a model of propriety then you can’t start making exceptions. Especially not so early on. A couple of years in and people may not notice so much. You have to be above reproach. Yes, it might be a loss not to go to the football. And you might resent having to buy a few more suits for yourself. But that all rather goes with the job. Being prime minister may be a career highlight for a politician but you have to take the downsides.
Perhaps Starmer has been too honest for his own good. Maybe he should have been more like Boris Johnson. Keir has made himself accountable by listing his freebies in detail. We know exactly where all the money went. With Boris we are largely in the dark. He took whopping gifts from all sorts of undesirables and we aren’t entirely sure of the details. Being prime minister was a licence for Boris to cash in. No one expected any different from him. He never pretended to be on the side of the angels.
Then there is the question of Sue Gray’s pay. You could say that someone should have suggested that Sue drop £4,000 in salary just for appearances. So she earned less than the prime minister. Maybe throw in a clothes allowance and an events expense account to make up the difference. No one will notice. Surely. I guess she is a tough negotiator. One of the reasons she was made chief of staff.
But all this is not really the point. The issue is why the Labour party is indulging in open feuds with itself by leaking the story in the first place. We were promised a government of service and yet it already appears to be totally dysfunctional. It’s as if Starmer has taken the Tories as his role model. How did it come to this that half of the No 10 top team hate the other half? And vice versa. Couldn’t someone have just got in a therapist? Or at the very least established a workplace culture where people talked to one another? Or – and here’s a thought – pay junior staff the proper rate?
Still, Keir isn’t entirely a slow learner. There’s a tradition that prime ministers do a round of regional radio stations on the Thursday before a party conference. But after the last two years, when Liz Truss and Sunak had an hour they would rather forget, Starmer decided to reset the format to pre-recorded outings where he hoped there would be less room for disaster. All the interviews would be released at 5pm when he hoped no one would be watching.
So it was left to the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, to do the morning media round. An experience he would rather forget. Reynolds comes across as a decent man but too much more of this and he will find himself Labour’s answer to Mel Stride. The minister who gets to do the rubbish jobs that no one else will. In future, on days like this, I am sure he will learn to put his phone on mute and not take calls from the No 10 comms team. It’s early days, I suppose.
On Times Radio, Aasmah Mir cut to the chase. Why did Starmer accept so many freebies? Reynolds forgot to engage his brain. It was like this, he said. Politicians get invited to events all the time and it would be rude not to go. It was the way people tried to engage with decision makers. Sure thing. That’s why it was vital for Boris Johnson to accept a freebie to Evgeny Lebedev’s party in Italy. And a Taylor Swift concert is a prerequisite for stopping the winter fuel allowance.
It very much sounded as if he was talking about the perks of the job, said Mir. Oh no, replied Reynolds. Far from it. Perish the thought. Just that politicians worked extremely hard and deserved a little downtime. Especially if they didn’t have to pay for it. The thought occurred that if Starmer was desperate to see Arsenal he could have afforded the cost of a seat with the corporates. It was just strange that all these dazzling freebies were never offered to the rest of us.
Over on Sky, Kay Burley was outraged by the size of Sue Gray’s salary. One wonders what Burley’s wedge is. I’m not sure she would get out of bed for £170,000. She would consider that an insult. But I’m sure that’s not the point. Even so, Reynolds still couldn’t think straight. Why not just say that Dominic Cummings and other Downing Street heads of staff would have been on a similar sort of salary if you allowed for inflation. The same people outraged now were not outraged then. It could just be that £170,000 is the going rate for the job and that it is the prime minister who is underpaid. A thought.
So the nonsense will continue into the Labour party conference starting this weekend. And Labour really doen’t have anyone to blame but itself. Freebies and staff pay should have been headed off ages ago. And maybe it doesn’t matter if we have a government that is bad at politics if it gets the big calls right. After all, the chances are we’ll be talking about something else in a month’s time. Head down and onwards and sideways.