Starmer's glass jaw

As I write in the Guardian today, Labour made big promises on cleaning up politics. It must fulfil them or risk real damage and an irretrievable breach of public trust

“Labour will end the chaos of sleaze,” the party’s election-winning manifesto thundered. The nation, Keir Starmer promised, would “turn the page” after years of Conservative scandal.

Yet, after less than three months in office, the prime minister is facing a slew of cronyism allegations of his own. A former banker was briefly appointed to the Treasury after donating £20,000 to the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Staffers at Starmer’s in-house thinktank, Labour Together, have been handed supposedly apolitical civil service roles.

And then there is the question of who pays for Lady Starmer’s clothes. The answer, at least in part, is the Labour peer Lord Alli. The millionaire entrepreneur, it emerged at the weekend, has been footing the bill for a personal shopper, clothes and alterations for the prime minister’s wife.

Alli’s munificence has been noted before. He has bought clothes and glasses for Starmer and donated more than £700,000 to the Labour party during his life. Last month, Alli hit the headlines after he was given a temporary pass to No 10.

Starmer’s team, reports suggest, only became aware that the dresses needed to be declared when companies approached his wife offering free products. The Labour leader then went to parliamentary authorities. This was the right thing to do. The defence of the foreign secretary, David Lammy – that Britain’s first family needs political donors to buy their clothes “so they can look their best” when representing the country – was less laudable. (Between them, Keir and Victoria Starmer earn north of £200,000, according to the Sunday Times.)

Conservative central office has said that Starmer’s sartorial saga “beggars belief”. That’s a bit rich coming from a party that set up the Covid VIP lane and whose frontrunner for leader, Robert Jenrick, admitted “apparent bias” in overturning a planning decision in favour of a billionaire property developer (who also happened to subsequently donate to the party).

But the opposition has been able to make hay with the story because it highlights what is fast becoming Labour’s glass jaw: a failure to recognise the tension between private interests and public office.

Take Starmer’s defence this week: “All MPs get gifts.” That’s not strictly true. Most MPs accept freebies, but not all. And no MP gets more gifts than the Labour leader: Starmer has accepted more than £100,000 in gifts since 2019, according to his most recent declarations in the register of MPs’ interests and a Financial Times investigation published in July. As well as personal effects, Lord Alli spent £20,000 on accommodation for the now prime minister during the general election.

By all accounts, Alli is not a political donor who seeks to influence party policy. That may well be so, but recent years show the dangers of giving wealthy, private individuals privileged access to political leaders: Boris Johnson started off declaring “fuck business” – the traditional source of Tory funding – and ended up with donors paying to refurbish his Downing Street flat.

It is tempting to imagine a bygone era of British politics in which corruption was something that only happened on far-flung shores. The reality is rather different. Influence has long been bought and sold. “Rotten boroughs” pockmarked parliament in the 18th and 19th century.

The Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George shamelessly sold seats in the House of Lords. John Major and Tony Blair’s administrations featured scandals around questions, peerages and passports that all came with the same prefix: cash.

Part of Labour’s problem is that we have all become far more attuned to the merest whiff of corruption. When I first started writing about dark money in British politics, after the Brexit referendum, it felt like a minority pursuit indulged in by a handful of journalists and transparency campaigners. Political funding stories were news but they rarely led the news.

Years of rolling scandals changed all that, and have left behind a mass media that is far more practised at telling these stories and a British public, with little appetite for forgiveness, hungry for narratives that will confirm their record low trust in our political class.

At the same time, Labour has not helped itself. Starmer has made his party more reliant on private sector support than ever. In opposition, Labour bulked out a thin shadow cabinet team with secondees from banks, consultancies and management companies who would have a very real interest in influencing government policy. Some of these firms even have staff still embedded in government departments.

Starmer has also courted former senior Labour figures who have significant private sector interests. Jacqui Smith left the political advisory firm Flint Global to become education minister. One-time Blair-era health secretary Alan Milburn has reportedly been attending meetings with civil servants. Milburn has no official role but, as we have previously reported here on Democracy for Sale, he has profited handsomely from advising private healthcare.

Then there’s Labour Together. The thinktank formerly run by Starmer’s right-hand man Morgan McSweeney has drummed up more than £4m from wealthy donors in the past 18 months – and handed out hundreds of thousands of pounds to select Labour candidates before the general election.

Some have raised concerns that Labour Together lacks transparency, and could be a route to influence party policy behind the scenes. As I noticed while flicking through the programme for next week’s party conference in Liverpool, Labour Together is co-hosting fringe events with Vodafone, EY and Uber. The risks of conflicts of interests are all too real.

Starmer is right to seek to “end the chaos of sleaze”. Corruption costs. Government Covid contracts worth £15billion had corruption “red flags”, with about £1billion of PPE from VIP suppliers deemed unfit for use, according to a report published last week by Transparency International. In the same organisation’s annual Corruptions Perception Index, the UK has fallen to 20th place, its lowest ever ranking.

But bringing probity to British public life needs more than warm words. As I wrote on here the day after the general election, Starmer needs to act now to fix our democracy. Our lobbying laws are so bad that even the lobbying trade body, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, has called for tougher rules. Political donors can give unlimited amounts, while anonymous dark money still seeps into the political system. The Freedom of Information Act is badly broken.

Yet Labour has made few concrete proposals for substantial reform. So far, a few loopholes will be closed but otherwise little will change. That’s bad for British democracy – and bad for Starmer, too.

As it stands, the chances are that, sooner or later, a much bigger scandal will come along than who paid for his wife’s high-end fashion. And when it does, “all MPs get gifts” is unlikely to cut it.

A version of this piece appeared on the Guardian.