Sitting on the front row at London Fashion Week, hair expertly coiffed, Anna Wintour-style dark glasses in place, a suitably enigmatic – some might say aloof – smile on her face, Lady Starmer looked like she didn’t have a care in the world.
Dressed head-to-toe in swanky clobber – loaned to her by the designer Edeline Lee, whose show she was attending this week – she seemed oblivious to how her decision to swan around London Fashion Week wearing thousands of pounds of borrowed clothes might come across.
Especially given that barely hours before, it had transpired that her husband, our sainted Prime Minister, had somehow overlooked the small matter of Lord Alli (he of the No10 pass) having provided substantial sartorial support to his wife.
Anyone with an ounce of self-knowledge in her position would have opted to keep a low profile; any political adviser with half a brain would certainly have told her to.
Lady Starmer seemed oblivious to how her decision to swan around London Fashion Week wearing thousands of pounds of borrowed clothes might come across
Instead, here she was, doubling down: doing the one thing most likely to cause offence in the circumstances and allowing herself to be pictured enjoying yet more fashion freebies.
No wonder she’s been dubbed Lady Victoria Sponger. How? How could she possibly think that this is a good look? Doesn’t she read the papers or listen to the news?
Or is she simply oblivious to it all, already too insulated in that No10 bubble, too seduced by the trappings of power to have any sense of the optics?
If this was a plotline in the BBC’s political satire The Thick Of It, Malcolm Tucker would be having an aneurism.
Perhaps it would helpful if I spelled it out. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is about to unleash a punishment beating of a Budget. Keir Starmer, PM and Lady Vic’s husband, has just taken away the winter fuel allowance for millions of low-income pensioners.
If there was ever a time to go gallivanting around town in a jacket worth four times that annual allowance – having already been gifted thousands more by fanboy Alli in return for open access to the corridors of power – this was probably not it.
But that’s the thing about this new Labour administration and their cheerleaders: they genuinely think they can do no wrong.
Already we’ve seen it in the attitude of Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, raving away in some VIP nightclub in Ibiza when she’s supposed to be helping rebuild the nation after the supposed mess left behind by the Tories.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, raving away in some VIP nightclub in Ibiza when she’s supposed to be helping rebuild the nation after the supposed mess left behind by the Tories
Her justification? She’s working class. Quite why that gives her a free pass is unclear, but apparently it does.
We’ve seen it in the way they’re banishing hereditary peers from the House of Lords while at the same time handing out plum jobs to the scions of Labour’s own aristocracy. Liam Conlon is the newly elected MP for Penge – his mother is Sue Gray, Starmer’s chief of staff.
He’s already been promoted to the role of Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Department for Transport.
Meanwhile, Georgia Gould (daughter of the late Philip Gould and Labour peer Gail Rebuck) is already a minister in the Cabinet Office. Isn’t that precisely the sort of cronyism they were elected to put a stop to?
We saw it at the weekend with the Foreign Secretary David Lammy, as he attempted to justify his boss’s ill-judged behaviour in a BBC TV interview.
Sir Keir wasn’t to blame, he told Laura Kuenssberg. It was the fault of the system, you see, which doesn’t make any financial provision for politicians and their spouses to ‘look their best’. Move on everyone, nothing to see here.
No one’s suggesting Lady Starmer doesn’t need to dress appropriately: but does it have to be £2,000 frocks and personal stylists?
If the Starmers really can’t spare the cash (even though as a couple they earn north of £200,000 a year, plus he’s said to be worth £3million), why not simply cut their cloth according to their means?
What’s wrong with Marks & Spencer, or Reiss, or even Zara? After all, Lady Vic is stunning, one of those women who can make even the humblest outfit look like couture.
In fact, if I were advising her, I’d encourage her to make a virtue of that. Buy vintage, get an aide to scour the charity shops for renewable bargains.
Get Mary Portas to put together a selection from her Living and Giving shops (a project with Save the Children), or ask the people at Oxfam – I’m sure they’d be delighted to help. All for a good cause – and how incredibly cool for the Prime Minister’s wife to be championing sustainable fashion; how very un-Tory, how very true Labour.
Instead, we get this, the very definition of champagne socialism. Helping yourself to the best of the best, while telling everyone else to tighten their belts (I refer you to the Labour member for Crawley, Peter Lamb, who last week suggested that pensioners had a ‘choice’ over whether to put the heating on).
It smacks of entitlement, arrogance, insensitivity – in short, all the things Labour and their supporters are supposed to be against in principle, the crimes they are forever accusing the Tories of committing.
Even though, of course, wife of former PM Boris, Carrie Johnson used to rent her posh frocks.
Samantha Cameron actually made half of hers, in her sewing room at No11, precisely because she struggled to find affordable outfits when her husband David was PM.
The fact that Starmer himself hasn’t shown the slightest bit of remorse, or even vaguely apologised, tells you exactly what frame of mind this government is in. In Sir Keir’s head, he’s done absolutely nothing wrong.
‘All MPs get gifts,’ he told reporters airily on his way to Rome at the weekend.
He is, of course, right. All MPs do indeed get gifts. In some ways it’s a bit of an occupational hazard. But it’s not enough simply to declare them.
The fact that Starmer himself hasn’t shown the slightest bit of remorse, or even vaguely apologised, tells you exactly what frame of mind this government is in. In Sir Keir’s head, he’s done absolutely nothing wrong
What’s far more important is to ensure such generosity – solicited or otherwise – is not seen to be buying special access or privilege. Such as, for argument’s sake, getting a pass to No10 Downing Street.
Sir Keir made it clear that he genuinely believes he is entitled to such largesse, explaining that he needed it to – wait for it – support his football team.
‘I’m a massive Arsenal fan,’ he said. ‘I can’t go into the stands because of security reasons. Therefore, if I don’t accept a gift of hospitality, I can’t go to a game. You could say, ‘well, bad luck’. That’s why gifts have to be registered. But, you know, never going to an Arsenal game again because I can’t accept hospitality is pushing it a bit far.’
Is it? Can’t he just watch the game on telly like most people?
And call me old-fashioned, but I would say what’s ‘pushing it a bit far’ is taking money from a multi-millionaire in exchange for certain privileges – while trying to maintain the facade that somehow you are a man of the people.
But this is the problem with power. It’s intoxicating. It makes you feel invincible.
It doesn’t really matter what political tribe you belong to: once you get your own motorcycle outriders and the traffic parts like the Red Sea every time you get in the back of that prime ministerial car, once entire rooms bow and scrape to you and everybody wants to be your best friend, it’s very hard to remain grounded.
That’s why so many politicians lose sight of what really matters. That’s why they very quickly lose touch with ordinary people – and that’s why they end up accepting gifts that, in all conscience, they can’t really justify.
It takes a very strong moral compass to resist the myriad enticements of power.
One that, by his own admission, Sir Keir does not seem to possess.