THE BIG READ: Labour have behaved like a bunch of muppets but the Government's biggest problem is the Chancellor
The much-lauded Rachel Reeves shows every sign of being an ultra-vain dud with zero empathy or judgment. Unless she gets her act together soon she will take them all down with her
WHEN Oscar Wilde wrote “I can resist anything except temptation”, he got the joke. Of course he did. He wasn’t in the habit of being witty accidentally. And after all, who wouldn’t get it?
Well, apparently our freeloading Cabinet who have been attempting to defend their penchant for taking free stuff from rich supporters and lobbyists by furrowing their brows (the importance of being earnest?) and seeming shocked that anyone could think them greedy.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has unconsciously acted out the Wilde joke most perfectly, explaining that she took free Taylor Swift tickets because her daughter wanted to go, which made it “a hard one to turn down”. There are probably many sets of two short planks out there with more self-awareness. It seems to have evaded her comprehension that being appealing tends to be a characteristic of junkets. The test of those they are targeted at is to have the self-control to say no. Hilariously, she even tried to pass off a birthday party for her paid for by Lord Alli as having taken place “in a work context”. This from a woman who lambasted Boris Johnson for claiming that a birthday buffet in No10 was primarily a work event.
Keir Starmer himself has also exhibited this same unappealing trait of many political “progressives” – a tendency to be their own most lenient critics despite holding political opponents to the sternest ethical standards.
Starmer claimed that “most people would say well, that’s a perfectly sensible arrangement” if they understood the security context of him taking free directors’ box tickets at Arsenal. Presumably he deems that free executive box tickets at away matches, provided by the Premier League or corporate hosts, would command similar public consent – even though the Premier League is lobbying hard over government plans for a football regulator. The underlying thought is “well, if we have done it then it must be reasonable as we are decent, nice and kind”.
The left-wing outlet Novara Media has meanwhile just revealed that Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds accepted a freebie to Glastonbury for himself and two senior staff as guests of YouTube. According to Novara: “Until then, Labour was promising to increase the digital service tax from two per cent to ten per cent. Literally the day after the festival, it emerged that Reynolds had ditched the policy.” Again it simply beggars belief that nobody thought about the optics of this coincidence, if coincidence it was.
Yet the evidence is that most people think that senior politicians, particularly those in power, simply shouldn’t accept freebies. When YouGov asked more than 4,000 respondents on September 23 whether MPs should accept tickets to football matches and concerts as gifts from donors or companies, 64 per cent deemed it unacceptable and just 25 per cent acceptable. That is hardly unreasonably puritanical given the strict rulebooks against accepting inducements that are commonplace in most economic sectors.
So Starmer is flat out wrong about public attitudes towards the behaviour of himself and his ministers. I suggest that this is because he has a chronic dose of the left-wing vanity bug. His conference speech relied heavily on the idea that the hated Tories had screwed up Britain because they were naturally greedy, opportunistic and lacking in moral fibre. The other side of the coin to this was his frequent boasting about his Labour party bringing in an ethos of “service”.
Even Tony Blair – the Labour leader of modern times who had the best antennae for public opinion in his early years – nearly came a cropper because of this trait. Right at the start of his term in office he exempted Formula One from a sports tobacco sponsorship ban after Labour received a huge donation from a related source. “I think most people who have dealt with me think I am a pretty straight sort of guy, and I am,” he said. Such was the extent of his political honeymoon at the time that most people grudgingly accepted his claim that the exemption did not occur because of the donation but because of the importance of the sport to the UK economy. But if he’d pulled that one a few years later, when the honeymoon was over, it could have brought him down.
Starmer, of course, was never given a honeymoon by voters but won his Blair-style landslide on little more than a third of the vote in a low turnout election simply because an exhausted Tory administration was more actively unpopular.
Unlike Blair, Starmer is also presiding in a period when law-abiding, tax-paying people have been getting continuously poorer. He is forcing hair-shirts upon the British public while living the high life himself thanks to wealthy benefactors who he must think are naturally drawn to his magnetic personality rather than simply seeking an opportunity to cosy up to power.
And the worst of it is that Starmer isn’t even the worst of it. When it comes to personal vanity he is put in the shade by two of his most senior Cabinet colleagues who have launched celebrations of themselves.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy began his Labour conference speech with a long screed about his self-advancement, culminating in the observation: “Conference, I can’t tell you how it feels to stand here today. A Black working-class man from Tottenham. A child of the great Windrush generation. Now back on stage as the Foreign Secretary in a Labour government.” Well, apparently you can tell us how it feels, David.
But even he has been eclipsed in the self-adoration stakes by Chancellor Rachel
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