Do the Starmers’ expensive donated clothes matter? Yes and no

Keir Starmer’s commitment to putting an end to “the chaos of sleaze” is already on the ropes, largely because of reports surrounding his wife’s clothes. The prime minister initially failed to declare clothes gifted to Victoria Starmer by Labour party donor Waheed Alli – although he has now done so.

Other gifts and hospitality, including tickets to see Taylor Swift in concert, have been properly declared but their total value amounts to more than £100,000 since December 2019 – a comparatively high sum.

The whole farrago raises several questions, the most pertinent of which are: is it a bit weird that the prime minister and his wife get their clothes bought for them? And, what does this mean for Labour’s wider promise to clean up British politics?

It is admittedly quite weird to hear that the Starmers are being dressed via donations. But we do have to keep a sense of proportion. Being a prime minister, or even a prominent politician, is a bit of a weird job. Being so rich that you can afford to buy the leader of the UK (and his wife) clothes is a bit of a weird place to be. And that is important when we think about wider issues of undue influence.

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When researching my book, Party Funding and Corruption, I interviewed lots of very rich party donors. Some were members of the Leader’s Group – an elite club with a £50,000-a-year entrance fee for which, in return, you got to go for dinner with Conservative ministers. I was amazed by the way in which they talked about these payments as if they were little more than Netflix subscriptions.

I also remember going to meet Stuart Wheeler, who at one point held the record for the largest one-off donation in British politics. I asked him why and his response was: “I suddenly became worth £90m … who cares if somebody is worth £90m or £85m … I’ll give them £5m”.

To me, £5m seemed quite significant, but it wasn’t, frankly, to the only person that mattered. All of which goes to say, just because something seems like a lot of money – or a weird arrangement – it might not be to those involved.

And although Starmer seems to take (or at least declare) more than most recent prime ministers, he’s by no means the only politician to accept gifts. Look at the register of members’ interests and you’ll see that Stuart Andrew (MP for Daventry) was given a couple of tickets to An Audience with Kylie Minogue, Polly Billiington (MP for East Thanet) got two for The Pet Shop Boys at the Royal Albert Hall, and Daisy Cooper, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, got two VIP tickets to the Brit awards.

In fact, if you CTRL-F “tickets” in the register you’ll get 184 hits. And I guarantee I’ll be doing precisely the same exercise this time next year, CTRL-Fing “Oasis” to see who managed to nab one (“value of donation in kind: PRICELESS”).

Not only that, I presume we do all remember Boris Johnson’s wallpaper, and his trip to Mustique.

38 holidays and a pile of Danish underpants

In the US there were calls for supreme court justice Clarence Thomas to resign last year (not the first time his position on the court has been questioned) after gifts of 38 holidays and tickets to sporting events went undeclared.

And, as the BBC reported, Brigitte Macron, wife of French president Emmanuel, has been loaned clothes from Louis Vuitton. In Germany, ministers were criticised for spending €450,000 on hairdressers, make-up artists and photographers.

My personal favourite is a 2014 scandal from Denmark that I dubbed “pantsgate”. This involved the then PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen coming under fire for spending £20,000 worth of state funds on clothes, including some quite natty underwear. His defence, I suggested, was legally sound because the funds were for “political purposes”. And, well, you really are quite unlikely to win an election if you campaign naked.

Why freebies matter

On balance, this situation is probably fairly serious. No one realistically thinks that gifting Keir Starmer tickets to see Taylor Swift or loaning his wife clothes is going to sway him on key government policy, but these stories do speak to a general sense of unfairness – that the very rich have a proximity to power that others simply don’t.

Easing the path to access for some and not others shrinks the deliberative space. It means that the same kinds of voices get heard by prime ministers and people in government over and again. Their views and their priorities come to occupy an outsized place in the discussion. It is, as political scientist Holly Ann Garnett wrote: “the most exclusionary form of political participation, since it is overwhelmingly a function of a donor’s income”.

I will always maintain that very simple quid-pro-quo arrangements are incredibly rare in British politics. That, as a member of the Leader’s Group told me years ago, they can “no more sway party policy than fly to the moon”.

But these kinds of less direct arrangements still risk anchoring decision-makers to certain types of policy favoured by those that get this privileged access. And we do know for sure that donors get preferential access to politicians and that their policy preferences are more often represented than those of normal citizens.

Without wanting to sound cynical, all politicians with significant power will find themselves in ethical hot water sooner or later. It comes with the territory. The inevitable accusations of hypocrisy shouldn’t put anyone off trying to improve the system. And Starmer did promise to do so before these controversies flared up.

There are things that can be done. The UK’s system of political financing and lobbying could do with either a light tune up, or a complete rethink (depending how radical you are feeling). Likewise, there are problems with parliamentary standards – and just who is in charge, and who is overseeing what.

All of these can be relatively quick, and relatively easy, wins. Many of the problems, and solutions, have been covered in numerous reports and parliamentary inquiries. In fact, they are so ready that you might even call them “off the peg”. Anyone for shopping?

Sam Power receives funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. He has also been funded by the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council.