Labour has always been as ‘sleazy’ as the Tories

In some ways you have to admire the brass neck of the Labour Party. It spent the past four years in opposition accusing the Tories of ‘cronyism’, of building a ‘chumocracy’ by dishing out contracts to friendly businessmen, of being uniquely corrupt and sleazy. And yet, now that it has gained power, it is gifting civil-service jobs to supporters and chums, and granting special favours to donors.

The hypocrisy is head-spinning. Think back to May 2021, when Starmer issued his now familiar pledge to ‘clean up our politics’. That was the same year he described then PM Boris Johnson as a man ‘synonymous with sleaze’. He even promised to introduce ‘a truly independent anti-corruption and anti-cronyism commission’. He continued to peddle this narrative of Tory sleaze right up until this year’s General Election. Just a few months ago, he was still promising to restore ‘standards in public life with a total crackdown on cronyism’.

After just eight weeks in power, Starmer’s self-righteous posturing already rings hollow. Labour’s friends and associates are seemingly being gifted influence and positions of authority simply for being, well, Labour’s friends and associates.

It emerged earlier this month that Labour’s biggest donor, TV mogul and Labour peer Waheed Alli, had been given unrestricted (if apparently temporary) access to No10, a privilege usually reserved for formally employed political advisers or civil servants.

And why might Alli have enjoyed such special treatment? No one seems quite sure. Or if they do know, they’re not saying. One suspects that alongside Lord Alli’s largesse, his friendships with Labour higher-ups might just have something to do with it. He was best man at Labour MP Emily Thornberry’s wedding and is close to Anji Hunter, Sir Tony Blair’s director of communications. He’s also close to Starmer himself, having donated £16,200-worth of ‘work clothing’ and ‘multiple pairs of glasses’ worth £2,485 to the prime minister. Most intriguing of all, he gave £10,000 to support Liam Conlon’s successful bid to become Labour MP for Beckenham and Penge. Conlon, I should add, just happens to be the son of Starmer’s chief of staff and all-round Westminster demiurge, Sue Gray. It certainly seems as if ‘chumocracy’ is alive and well in Starmer’s No10.

If giving the fella who produced 1990s yoof show The Word the run of Downing Street seems unlikely ‘to restore standards in public life’, then giving Labour donors and apparatchiks senior civil-service roles hardly seems in keeping with a ‘total crackdown on cronyism’. In fact, it seems exactly like a means to stuff Whitehall with Labour cronies. Although given the Blob’s Guardianista worldview, many will wonder why that would even be necessary.

Civil-service positions are meant to be filled through a fair and open application process overseen by an independent selection panel. But Labour has circumvented that by using the ‘exceptions process’. This allows it to directly appoint its chosen ones as civil servants, albeit on a time-limited basis.

So far, there’s Jess Sargeant, a constitutional-reform expert from Starmerite think-tank Labour Together, who has been appointed to run the propriety and constitution group at the Cabinet Office. There’s Emily Middleton, a former adviser to a shadow-cabinet minister whose firm seconded her to the Labour Party for the princely sum of £68,000. She’s now a director-general at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. There’s Haydon Etherington, a former policy adviser to deputy PM Angela Rayner, who has now landed a plum role in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. There’s Labour aide Mitchell Burns-Jackson who Gray herself has hired as executive assistant to her private office. Finally, there’s Ian Corfield, a banker who donated £20,000 to Labour MPs, including £5,000 to chancellor Rachel Reeves. Corfield was appointed as the Treasury’s director of investment, a role that would have earned him almost six-figures. He was forced to quit last week, after it emerged the civil-service watchdog had not been told of his financial contributions, presumably to Reeves’ wardrobe and glasses collection.

In many ways, what Labour is doing is hardly unusual. David Cameron’s Tory governments of the 2010s also made use of the ‘exceptions’ process to appoint several political advisers to civil-service roles on fixed-term contracts. Theresa May tried to put a stop to this during her brief time in office. More importantly, virtually every British government since Margaret Thatcher has attempted to shape the civil service in its image through reform and appointment policies. For good reason, too – to try to ensure that the machinery of state does the bidding of our elected representatives. Something it was not very keen to do during the Brexit years.

It’s the double standards that are really grating here. For the past few years, Labour and large swathes of our media condemned the Tories’ attacks on the so-called Blob as a violation of the much-vaunted impartiality of the civil service. As one New Statesman columnist was moved to lament at the time: ‘I find myself wondering whether I live in a corrupt country of the sort that Britain once regarded with pity and disdain.’ Yet now that Labour is in power, that precious civil-service impartiality no longer seems to matter. Even the critical coverage of Labour’s civil-service appointments tends to express sympathy with Labour’s claim that it simply wants to introduce more ‘expertise’ into Whitehall. This is largely because most of the commentariat supports Labour’s technocratic mission to govern via like-minded know-betters.

The hypocrisy of Labour and large parts of the media shouldn’t really surprise us. After all, we’ve been here before during the New Labour era. It rode to power in 1997, posing as the whiter-than-white alternative to the sleazy, corrupt Tories. At the fag end of John Major’s administration, the Conservatives were infamously beset by sex and financial scandals. Like Starmer today, New Labour promised to restore trust and purge politics of sleaze and corruption.

Yet no sooner had Labour gained power than it emerged that Tony Blair and Co had received a £1million donation from then Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone, at about the same time as it had exempted Formula One from its planned ban on tobacco advertising. And that was just the first of several allegations of donors exerting influence on Labour policy.

New Labour did its bit for cronyism, too, awarding supporters and donors peerages. So serious a problem did the so-called cash-for-honours scandal become that the police interviewed Tony Blair under caution twice in 2007.

Then, of course, there is Peter Mandelson, a one-man sleaze magnet, whom successive Labour governments have repeatedly had to let go but couldn’t help reappointing. Lest we forget, in 2008, The Sunday Times revealed that Mandelson, then Britain’s European Commissioner, gave trade concessions worth up to £50million a year to Russia’s then richest man, Oleg Deripaska, after being ‘entertained’ on his superyacht. Incredibly, it is being rumoured that the current Labour government is thinking of making Mandelson Britain’s new ambassador to the US.

Despite all this, Starmer, cheered on by large parts of our media class, wants us to believe that not only was the last government uniquely corrupt and cronyistic, but also that his Labour government is the virtuous antidote. The donors enjoying unprecedented access to Downing Street and the Labour supporters being parachuted into the civil service tell a very different story – of the murky meshing of business interests and the state, and of the partiality of the civil service. It is a story in which Labour continues to play a starring role.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.