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In terms of Reeves’ family values, the chancellor of the exchequer can hardly be faulted, she has been explaining, for snagging box tickets to a teens’ pop concert, careless of the consequences if this gift became public when her spring statement was slashing welfare. “It is a balancing act in my job to try and be a good parent”. Inferior parents should note that help is available: Sabrina Carpenter returns to the UK this summer, seats available for £191 each (VIP £364).
Keir Starmer once said that, under him, Britain would be the party of the family and the “best place to grow up in”: we can already feel confident that, thanks to his approach to dynamic sponging, no child of a Labour minister need be denied their essential football or concert outing, regardless of ticket price or scarcity. Starmer leads the way with his non-negotiable visits to theArsenal directors’ box, a perk that Sky Sports at Chequers cannot be expected to replace. “It means I can continue to do something which is really special to me,” he said (after his free specs and outfits scandal), “which is to go to football with my boy.”
But as Reeves said last week, risking a further Labour masterclass in tin-eared entitlement, Sabrina Carpenter is not special to her. She obtained reportedly £600 worth of tickets on a more sacrificial basis for her daughter, for whom, we are invited to believe, no other companion was available. Plus Reeves would have loved to be “in normal seats”. Anyway, she eventually conceded, after repeated freebie questions had disrupted post-Statement interviews: “I wouldn’t do it again, I felt I was doing the right thing, but I do understand perceptions.”
Leave aside the ethical complexities that would, if poncing free stuff is virtuous, make Boris Johnson a living saint – why did she do it in the first place? It might be standard among Starmer favourites but polling confirms, unsurprisingly, that the public deplores parliamentary freeloading, just as it does MPs having second jobs. Last week, the housing minister, Matthew Pennycook (“If I want to go to a concert, I’ll pay”), spoke for decent MPs who have to live with the loss of public respect generated by less scrupulous colleagues. As with the recent discovery that the speaker Lindsay Hoyle’s “working trips”, sometimes undertaken with his employee Lady Hoyle, have cost £250,000 since October 2022, the public’s disappointment is arguably more acute when inflicted by supposedly evolved politicians given to effusions about “working people”, than by Tory degenerates with a known specialism in lushery. If principle alone is not enough to stop Starmer allowing elite freeloading to contaminate his deliberate, former-prosecutor’s, son-of-a-toolmaker, opposite-of-Johnson projection of decency, how come pragmatism has also failed?
Last November, it’s true, Starmer, then recently embarrassed for accepting more freebies than any other MP, “tightened up” the ministerial code. His sententious introduction (with its ritual homage to “working people”) began – as well it might after his consignments of Lord Alli’s “multiple” free specs (£2,435.00) and “work clothing” (£26,200) – “Restoring trust in politics is the great test of our era”. Bafflingly, at least to this working person, his revised version, which couldsimply have put a stop to undue gifts, has instead preserved the fault that facilitates the exact opposite. As with personal judgment on second jobs for MPs (a flourishing affront to constituents that Starmer once opposed), the acceptance of gifts was left to individual ministers, as opposed to straightforwardly banned.
Beneficiaries must now, the code blithers, consider before taking gifts the “need to maintain the public’s confidence in the standards of propriety”. So, pre-Carpenter, Reeves presumably gave that her intensest consideration. For as long as meeting this requirement depends on the ethics or wisdom of the takers, you gather that parliament’s long-overdue protection from greedy and entitled members is an outcome that does not interest the current possessor of a massive Labour majority. The new code need not have discouraged 11 MPs from accepting £17,000 worth of Taylor Swift tickets, it still indulges Starmer and colleagues’ off-duty access to free VIP football and other sports tickets, a benefit not everywhere considered more endearing than Johnson’s infamous, magnate-subsidised lifestyle. One thinks, in particular, of those individuals once advised by Starmer, that “handouts from the state do not nurture the same sense of self-reliant dignity as a fair wage”.
But Starmer is not, thankfully, done with safeguarding parliament’s reputation. His new “modernisation committee” will consider, among other things, “how to restore public trust in politics”. Older voters may register, among 14 members selected by party whips, the Tory and Viktor Orbán sympathiser, Christopher Chope. Prior to the expenses revelations of 2009, the Telegraph reported, he “drove a Chesterfield sofa 85 miles to have it reupholstered for £881 at taxpayers’ expense”. Parliament also employs his consort, Mrs Chope.
It may further comfort our keenest parliamentary freeloaders that the person heading this body is Lucy Powell MP, leader of the Commons and most recent runner-up to Starmer in the freebie acceptance league, with £40,289 of declared gifts. As much as Powell prizes high standards, telling the Guardian, “We need to make sure we’re meeting that public smell test”, both the Register of Interests and her defence of gifts on Question Time have suggested personal olfactory organs highly adapted to the current parliamentary environment. Powell’s impressive haul has included, along with sports and cultural events purportedly justified by her old, shadow Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport job, pairs of tickets to watch tennis (£564), the Ashes (£600) and the Silverstone Grand Prix (£464).
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We cannot be sure, admittedly, that gifts and free VIP access to sport and cultural events are not, in ways mysterious to most working people, critical to Powell, Starmer, Reeves and no end of Tory colleagues in discharging their professional duties. But stopping them is the only way to find out.
