Freebiegate / Wardrobegate and the headlines they generated had already made sure things aren’t exactly rosy in the Number Ten garden. And that was before Rosie Duffield’s brutal resignation note as a Labour MP turbocharged the pressure on Sir Keir Starmer and his inner circle.
As a Labour supporting commentator despairing over the needless own goals being scored by our Arsenal-supporting prime minister and his team, a passing thought struck me. Why apparently isn’t there an Alastair Campbell figure in the squad. Not the Alastair Campbell (he wouldn’t fancy it anyway) but a spin doctor in the house in Downing Street who can spot the potential pratfalls looming, manage damage control fallout and resurrect the team discipline that marked Labour’s pre-election image.
If the furore around freebies, donors and divisive Sue Gray’s salary and power resemble a beyond satire episode of Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It (and even though his ruthless spinmeister Malcolm Tucker was undeniably based on Campbell), it’s hard to see own goals being conceded like Starmer on camera ‘freebie-ing’ at an Arsenal match with Gray and David Lammy in tow when these issues were dominating the news agenda happening if Campbell or a figure like him had been around.
The fact that the prime minister couldn’t see the problem through his ultra-expensive Lord Alli funded spectacles is spectacularly worrying. Ditto Rachel Reeves, Lady Starmer and even Angela Rayner when it came to Wardrobegate.
Rosie Duffield
Alarmingly, I’ve lost track of Labour backbenchers, and even a few junior ministers, who tell me they privately empathise with much of Rosie Duffield’s explosive resignation raison d’être. At his peril does the prime minister shrug off her words like, “I’m so ashamed of what you and your inner circle have done to tarnish and humiliate our once proud party. Mass hypocrisy I can’t be part of. It’s greed. Why else would someone on so much more money than most people get free gifts. He can absolutely afford his own clothes — we all can.” Or her reference to “cruel and unnecessary” policies over the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance cut and the refusal to scrap the 2-child cap on benefits. Along with her accusation that Starmer and his top team are guilty of “sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice off the scale”.
Unsurprisingly, the Sunday Telegraph gleefully splashed on the Duffield resignation attack while it also made the front pages of the Observer, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Express. It even put a small spring in the step of those gathering at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham where the talk about who’ll succeeded Rishi Sunak was interlaced with anticipation that Duffield’, headline-seizing action would accelerate the already startling collapse in Starmer’s poll ratings. The Mail on Sunday inevitably devoted a whole page to it, headlined ‘Nepotism, sleaze and greed are off the scale, blasts MP Rosie as she quits Labour’, alongside the image of her full resignation letter on House of Commons notepaper. Only the Mail titles’ hugely expensive and extravagantly billed ‘Political Memoir of the Century’ serialisation of Boris Johnson’s decidedly colourful new book kept it off Page 1. Back on page 27, columnist Sarah Vine (estranged wife of former Tory cabinet Machiavelli and new Spectator editor Michael Gove) weighed in under the somewhat pretentious headline: ‘Orwell would have a field day with Sir Keir’s band of socialist freebie lovers’. That said, it was hard to disagree with her opening sentence — “Clothes maketh the man, they say. In the case of Keir Starmer, they seem to have become his undoing.”
The problem for the prime minister deepened with Rosie Duffield’s live appearance on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC Sunday political show when she apologised to her Canterbury constituents saying, “I never thought in a million years I would leave this party... it’s in your soul and your heart... I’m from a very different background to Keir Starmer, I was a single mum who needed the Labour party. It’s just so profoundly disappointing as a Labour voter and a former recipient of tax credits in a low-paid job to see this is what we’ve become.” Her resignation also set the embarrassing record of being the fastest ever by an MP from an election winning party. Duffield also suggested a ‘lads in charge’ culture dominates the Downing Street operation and claimed that Starmer himself has a ‘problem with women’.
Lad culture?
Even the prime minister’s very close ally and normally unflappable media performer, Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the man who oversees the Cabinet Office, gave one of his least assured broadcast appearances on the Kuenssberg programme responding to the Duffield attack. Quipping that he’s “too old” to be a lad and announcing the Labour government would introduce new, tighter rules on declaring donations and gifts looked more a case of closing the stable door after the reputational horse had bolted.
A normally strong Starmer supporting senior female backbencher told me privately: “Rosie isn’t wrong about a macho clique wielding undue influence inside No10, and that’s despite us having the first ever female chancellor, a woman deputy prime minister, a female chief of staff and more women MPs alone than the Tories can muster in total. Sadly, misogyny isn’t yet dead in Downing Street.”
The trouble for the Starmer government isn’t that they are sleazier, greedier, seedier, more crony-tainted than the Tories. Because they are patently not after 14 years of scandal-mired Conservative administrations. But in the court of public opinion, when you fight an election campaign significantly based on commanding the moral high ground and purportedly led by an incorruptible, almost puritanically unblemished man of the people, the scent of hypocrisy hangs heavily toxic in the air.
It also delivers a legitimate free gift to your enemies in the right-wing newspapers, no matter how cynically opportunistic and hypocritically they seize it for all it’s worth. By the same token, it puts your media allies between the proverbial rock and a hard place.
It even triggered the almost unprecedented sight of the Daily Mail lauding its bête noire, the Guardian, on September 27 for unearthing damaging aspects of Starmer’s freebies record with the revelation that his Lord Alli clothing donations had risen to £32,000, his collection of designer glasses to £2,400 and the family use of Alli’s £18m Covent Garden penthouse for 7 weeks during the election period which amounted to the value of £20, 437. His explanation it was to protect his son from protesters and media intrusion while his son was studying for his GCSEs hasn’t exactly placated media critics or even normally loyal backbenchers.
The Starmer defence is that all of these have been properly declared and are within the rules, although the Mail eagerly reported the Guardian revelation that the clothing donations had simply been listed in the MPs register of interests as ‘support for the private office of the leader of the opposition’. Misleading or not? Take your pick, I suppose.
The Mail went on to focus on Angela Rayner registering an £8,500 Lord Alli donation last November listed as support for her in ‘capacity as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, with an identical listing for an £8,250 donation in April this year. A third donation of £3,550 in June and shortly before the election was initially listed simply as a ‘donation in kind’ but Ms Rayner has since acknowledged it was for clothing.
Do they get it?
Reflecting the reaction of both many of its own readers and the opinion polls generally, the Guardian ran a chastening pre-Duffield drama leader on September 26th under the headline: ‘When public trust in politics is this fragile, ministers accepting gifts on such a scale was a mistake’. It went on tellingly: “The questions from broadcasters over freebies were blunt: ‘Do you get it, though?’ and ‘Can’t You see how it looks?’. Judging from the responses given by Sir Keir Starmer the worrying answer appears to be: Not really.”
“But at a time when public confidence in political and other institutions is fragile, and party loyalties less secure than ever before, the fallout from the PM’s declaration of interests including £107,000-worth of gifts is a clumsy own goal. Labour won office on a promise of change that explicitly referred to conduct as well as policy. Sir Keir’s pride in his working-class background, and the values of decency and tenacity he took from it, were a key part of his pitch to voters — and a point of difference with the Tories, whom Labour pilloried for cronyism and a lack of probity.
“It is remarkable, given this background and the emphasis placed by Sir Keir on public service, that he and his advisers were not more alive to the risks associated with donations.”
In common with other papers, right and left leaning, the Guardian leader centred on Sir Keir’s lavish acceptance of free football tickets for himself, family and friends when the Premier League is lobbying his government to water down the powers of a new football regulator originally proposed by the previous Tory administration but championed strongly by Labour.
The Guardian leader concluded: “Rebuilding public trust in politics. and not only their party, is arguably the single biggest challenge facing Labour, and is key to blocking the rise of the populist right. The ministerial code must be updated quickly. Less than three months in, the government needs to turn over a new leaf.”
Sentiments I shared even as I sat in a GB News studio as a left of centre voice on the afternoon of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party Conference speech. OK, I argued uneasily, the Freebiegate / Wardrobegate scandal amounts to small financial beer compared to the hundreds of millions of £s in often-dud PPE dished out to Tory donors and cronies during the pandemic. Recovering the money was a plan briefly referred to by Chancellor Rachel Reeves earlier in her conference speech and which I wrongly predicted Starmer would develop in his but disappointingly didn’t.
That said, the most damning words for me came on the pages of another pro-Labour title, the Mirror. My ex-colleague and veteran columnist Brian Reade, a Labour man to his core, wrote beneath the headline: ‘Free Gear Keir needs to clean up his act fast or the real grasping sleazebag Tories will be back’. Covering Labour’s party conference as usual he continued: “We witnessed the return of sleaze in the dying years of this latest Tory rabble with Partygate, tractor porn, sexual harassment, breaking their own Covid rules to seduce mistresses or visit castles and the handing of eye-popping contracts to their own donors.
“After 14 years of believing they were untouchable, the disgusted electorate booted them out, handing Labour a landslide. So who would have thought three months after Labour were elected on a pledge to serve no one but the people, the message from their first party conference would be drowned out by sleaze allegations... Who’d have thought Prime Minister Keir Starmer would later in New York have Sky’s Beth Rigby telling him how bad his seemingly insatiable appetite for freebies looks, and asking him if he’s really ‘Continuity Johnson’?
It would be wonderful to imagine someone printing out and framing Reade’s words and strategically placing them permanently on the PM’s No10 desk. But that would require someone with the clout of a Tucker / Campbell figure and they’re in short supply these days.
