STEPHEN GLOVER: What type of a socialist is sir Keir Starmer?

Sir Keir Starmer presents himself to the British people as honest and straightforward. A man of rectitude, who served as Director of Public Prosecutions.

In 2021 he called the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, ‘Major Sleaze’, and claimed that his administration was ‘mired in sleaze, cronyism and scandal’. This was a charge repeated numerous times in various forms by Sir Keir.

Now he himself is open to the accusation of cronyism and sleaze. He has certainly caused a scandal, though many in the British media seem remarkably relaxed about what he has done.

We already knew that this year a multi-millionaire Labour peer called Lord Alli has given £18,685 worth of clothes and several pairs of glasses to the Prime Minister. We also knew that the same Lord Alli obtained a No 10 security pass and used it to entertain Labour donors in the garden of Downing Street.

Sir Keir has breached parliamentary rules by failing to declare that Lord Alli recently bought expensive clothes for Lady Starmer, writes Stephen Glover

A new bombshell has now landed, thanks to the Sunday Times. Sir Keir has breached parliamentary rules by failing to declare that Lord Alli has recently bought expensive clothes for Lady Starmer, reported elsewhere to amount to some £5,000.

Imagine the response if Boris Johnson had been guilty of such behaviour. There would have been an explosion of wrath. Labour MPs would have been welcomed into broadcasting studios to denounce him. And yet, as I say, there has been little outrage in Starmer’s case.

This story breaks down into two parts. Why does a rich man, reckoned to be in the top one per cent of earners, need a multi-millionaire to buy his clothes? And was the failure to inform the parliamentary authorities that Lady Starmer had accepted free clothes an oversight or a deliberate act of concealment?

Let’s take the first part first. It is utterly bewildering that a man on £166,786 a year, whose wife is thought to earn an annual salary of £50,000 as an NHS occupational health worker, should need someone else to pay for his or her clothes.

His reliance on rich donors goes beyond Lord Alli. The Financial Times has reported that, between the 2019 general election and July 1 this year, Starmer declared £76,000 worth of clothes, entertainment and other free items from donors.

By most standards, he’s a wealthy man, owning a house in North-West London thought to be worth about £2 million (though it may be partly mortgaged) and unburdened by private school fees because his two children go to state schools. His income in the 2022-23 tax year was a whopping £404,000.

I submit that if a man of such riches can’t clothe himself out of his own pocket, and turns instead to rich donors, he may be justifiably accused of greed or stinginess – or very possibly both.

Not only that. Starmer has recently reiterated that he sees himself as a socialist. How will many Labour voters, getting by on a fraction of the Prime Minister’s income, regard his partial dependence on hugely rich donors when he enjoys a standard of life far beyond their dreams?

If he were poor – for example like Keir Hardie, Labour’s first leader, whose Christian name his parents bestowed on him – no one would complain. But he’s rich – and yet he dips his hand into the goody bag as it passes.

Many will also be disconcerted, and some appalled, that a privileged person calling himself a socialist can deprive poor pensioners of their winter fuel allowance, and be contemplating tax raids (disavowed during the election campaign) on people much less well-off than he is.

It doesn’t smell right, does it? Nor does Starmer’s failure to inform the parliamentary authorities that his wife has also been on the receiving end of Lord Alli’s largesse. And yet, incredibly, Sir Keir was entirely unapologetic yesterday, and suggested he would continue to accept freebies from the multi-millionaire.

The Prime Minister may have relied on others to disclose these gifts, and they may have let him down. But it was his responsibility to ensure that the authorities were informed. One would expect no less from the man of rectitude he purports to be. 

The suspicion lingers that this wasn’t a mere oversight, and that someone in No 10 wanted to hide the donation to Lady Starmer, at any rate for a while, because disclosure was thought likely to cause the Prime Minister embarrassment following revelations about earlier gifts from Lord Alli.

Sir Keir isn’t the honest politician he pretends to be. Let me quote from a prescient Mail leader column published on September 25, 2009. It had emerged that Starmer, recently appointed Director of Public Prosecutions, had omitted his education at the selective Reigate Grammar School in his Who’s Who entry.

Sir Keir’s reliance on rich donors goes beyond Lord Alli, pictured

The leader suggested that ‘despite the fact that the school almost certainly made him the man he is, it didn’t fit with his image as a man of the people’. Then came the killer question: ‘Those who utter small lies invariably tell big ones as well. Don’t such small acts of deception tell us something significant about these public figures?’

That is precisely the point. Sir Keir Starmer may have prosecuted criminals in the name of the Crown, but he is in my view one of the most dishonest politicians of recent times – far more so than Boris Johnson, whom he chastised from a moral high ground he had no right to claim.

Speaking of Boris, it’s true that he accepted a large donation for fancy wallpaper and other items in No 10, but at least that was intended to embellish a national asset – rather than Boris himself, who sometimes looks as though he buys his clothes in an Oxfam shop.

Back to Sir Keir. His huge leaps of policy in a short space of time can’t be justified by the right to change one’s mind. He has given new meaning to the word ‘zigzag’. One moment he presents himself as a man of the ‘soft Left’, the next he is a paid-up Corbynite, supporting wealth taxes and other extreme measures.

In 2020 he stood as Jeremy Corbyn’s successor as Labour Party leader, promising a smorgasbord of Left-wing policies including the abolition of university tuition fees, the nationalising of privatised industries and the soaking of the better-off. He subsequently abandoned most of his pledges and repackaged himself as the moderate who was on show during the election campaign.

Once in power, he has lurched back in the direction from which he came, planning tax increases that were cynically concealed in the campaign, and allowing his deputy, Angela Rayner, full rein to extend trade union rights that, when implemented, are likely to take us back to the fractious 1970s.

I believe that the British people – remember that only about 20 per cent of the electorate voted Labour – are quickly cottoning on to

Sir Keir’s shape-shifting nature. His personal poll ratings are plummeting. Has any newly installed prime minister ever been barracked as Starmer was at Doncaster races over the weekend?

It took years for the Tories to become tarred with sleaze. Sir Keir has managed it in a matter of weeks.

This unedifying story of donations that the Prime Minister should never have accepted, and the apparent concealment of gifts to his wife, betray an inherent moral slipperiness. How long will it be before it defines the whole Government?