Starmer’s smug self-righteousness is coming home to roost

I expected the new British government to be rubbish, but I didn’t expect it to be this rubbish, this quickly. My advice to any remaining Labour fans or hope-against-hope fellow travellers is to accept the rubbishness now. After all, Tory fans kept faith in Boris for far too long, and that was a man so daft he thought he’d get fair dealing from Harriet Harman.

In the General Election, Keir Starmer and Co appealed to the section of the electorate that wanted to punish the Tories – and fair enough, so say all of us. But since then, they have enthusiastically taken up the same policies, only faster, harder and with gusto, expecting a different result.

Still, nothing sums up their 72 dismal days in office more than ‘Frockgate’. First we discovered that Labour peer and donor Waheed Alli had donated tens of thousands of pounds of ‘work clothing’ to kit out Sir Keir. Then The Sunday Times revealed this weekend that the prime minister had failed to declare that Alli has been buying clothes for Lady Victoria Starmer, too.

It is weird that as you get wealthier and more successful, you get more free stuff. When I started working in TV, I reflected ruefully that the free dinners I received now and again would have been a lot more appreciated when I was eating Asda-brand baked beans from a tin.

But still. Didn’t Lord Alli dispensing goodies strike Starmer as a liability? It’s so tone deaf, so egregiously inept. Look at the clearly furious ministers sent out to do the defensive media rounds – border-security minister Angela Eagle was snappy as a turtle on Times Radio, and looked like she had just swallowed a dingo’s testicle on a bushtucker trial. Paymaster general Nick Thomas-Symonds, appearing on GB News, just couldn’t keep microexpressions of pure savage rage from flickering across his face. It was like watching a boiling pot where the lid might fly off at any moment. Only foreign secretary David Lammy managed not to look embarrassed, and only because he is so stupid. Speaking on Sky News, he even advanced the bizarre theory that it was all perfectly reasonable because, after all, US first ladies supposedly get a glamour allowance (they don’t). Now that it has been revealed that the Starmers got free VIP seats to see Taylor Swift, I look forward to seeing Lammy saying that this is also absolutely fine, as after all there isn’t a taxpayer-funded budget for the PM’s vital attendance at gigs given by petite popstrels.

When directly challenged himself on Monday, Starmer did the naff lawyers’ trick of pretending to answer the question that was asked while answering a totally different question. He shifted the goalposts from the gowns to the reasonable security concerns around him attending football matches in the stands like anybody else. Fair enough. But are there reasonable security concerns about sending a spad down Primark with a couple of tenners to get something nice for the missus?

As ever, Starmer has tried to make this all about compliance with the rules. Those beautiful, beautiful rules. For the former lawyer, political leadership is just an extension of law. Everything is an extension of the law. Lovely law. Rich, creamy law. Saying ‘I didn’t technically break any of the rules’ might impress the beak or Starmer’s hair-splitting legal mates, but it doesn’t cut the mustard in the court of public opinion. Because what we now call the ‘optics’ of getting freebie designer gear are appalling.

Starmer may know the letter of the law but, as with his taking offence to audience laughter at his ‘my father was a toolmaker’ schtick, he doesn’t seem to understand very basic social rules. If you or I had made such a song and dance about Boris’s fancy wallpaper in the No10 flat, and hinted that a few sheets of Vymura would’ve done the trick perfectly adequately, then surely a multi-millionaire peer of the realm bunging sexy specs and glitzy gladrags our way would have set a little alarm bell ringing? If I had accepted fancy goods while simultaneously ripping a few measly quid from the frozen claws of pensioners, I would flush so red you would see me from space. As for Lady Starmer turning up at, of all places, London Fashion Week the Monday after the story broke – that surely takes the 2024 award for brass neck.

Of course, none of this would matter much but for the arrant, bald-faced hypocrisy of it, after all Labour’s gnashing of teeth and rending of garments about ‘Tory sleaze’. But different ‘rules’ apply, it seems. What if Mr and Mrs Sunak had done this, six months ago? Led By Donkeys would have launched a ‘hilarious’ poster campaign. The Last Leg lads would have had some choice words. James O’Brien would have turned a shade of mauve, like Violet Beauregarde midway through her transformation into a giant blueberry.

These unwritten laws seem, mysteriously, always to ignore or to exonerate Labour – much like the actual written laws that waved through Starmer’s ‘pause for food’ during lockdown, and Angela Rayner’s mortgage-juggling wheeze.

We’re stuck with these self-righteous, freeloading fools – not because we liked them, but because they were the only other brand on offer, like switching from one variety of scratchy toilet paper to another. Telling strikers they would happily pay them anything, shutting down the energy industry in the hope that it will always be quite a windy day, and now dropping clangers like Frockgate… God help us! All you can do is laugh. At least a ready supply of free laughs is guaranteed with this lot.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.