Well, there’s one win bonus I didn’t expect when I gave up my Spurs season tickets after 35 years: I won’t have to worry about bumping into Keir Starmer in the queue for the Gents at half-time.
The Mail on Sunday featured a photo of the Prime Minister hoovering up the hot-and-cold running hospitality in an executive box during the North London derby, tickets donated by Tottenham Hotspur PLC.
He was accompanied by a full team-sheet of fellow Labour freeloaders, including Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Downing Street Chief of Staff Sue Gray, who appeared to spend most of the game glued to her mobile phone.
Sister Suzie is obviously no stranger to the first-class compartment on the political gravy train, despite her formidable reputation as an incorruptible pillar of rectitude. She’s also insisted on being paid £170,000 a year – three grand more than Starmer – while simultaneously slashing the salaries of lowly special advisers.
That box of self-styled socialists at what we used to call White Hart Lane was packed tighter than the Arsenal penalty area. Sorry, make that Starmer’s ‘Beloved Arsenal’ as the Gooners must now be described at all times.
The Prime Minister hoovering up the hot-and-cold running hospitality in an executive box during the North London derby, tickets donated by Tottenham Hotspur PLC. He was accompanied by a full team-sheet of fellow Labour freeloaders, including Foreign Secretary David Lammy (top right) and Downing Street Chief of Staff Sue Gray (centre)
Whenever I hear that expression, for some reason I can’t help thinking of the classic Curb Your Enthusiasm episode ‘Beloved Aunt’. (Check it out.)
Nor do I understand why Starmer supports Arsenal and not Manchester United, like everyone else who grew up in Guildford.
I also don’t imagine that Lammy’s spiteful decision to halt some arms exports to Israel – seemingly to appease the pro-Palestine/Hamas headbangers in his party – would have gone down too well with sections of the Spurs crowd, either, which might explain the need for tight security. He was lucky not to be pelted with bagels.
Starmer claims that he has to take freebie seats in the most expensive sections of the ground on the advice of his close protection team.
But you might have thought the furore over his £107,000 from Waheed Alli and his prominence the previous week in the directors’ box at the Emirates would have given Starmer pause for thought before diving straight back into the trough.
No chance. As one might expect from a complete and utter lawyer, he insisted indignantly that everything was within the rules, including his free suits, glasses, his wife’s frocks and an earlier trip to Old Trafford as a guest of Manchester United.
Call me old-fashioned, but there’s something rather iffy about letting another man buy your wife’s clothes. Or is that just me?
Still, Starmer’s got his snout plunged deep in so many troughs he’d be nailed on to win next year’s British bog-snorkelling championships by a nautical mile.
With their leader, now our PM, up to his oxters in free stuff, it’s hardly any wonder that Labour’s liggers have been lining up to snaffle their share, too.
Ange Rayner, Starmer’s deputy, has benefited from thousands of pounds worth of clothes and a romantic weekend with her ex-boyfriend at Waheed’s pad in New York, worth at least £2,200.
Bridget Phillipson, in charge of dumbing down our schools, let Waheed pay for not one, but two 40th birthday parties. All within the rules, you understand.
Rachel Reeves, our first female Chancellor, who was on her hind legs at the Labour Conference in Liverpool yesterday, took £7,500 from a friend for frocks. Why?
Even before she got the gig at Number 11, she was on £91,000 a year as an MP. Her husband is a senior civil servant reportedly paid £111,000. They were getting over 200 grand between them, pre-election. Surely she could have afforded to buy her own trouser suits.
Yesterday it emerged that she had also accepted a free family holiday in Cornwall, worth £1,400, which hadn’t been properly declared. So no return to austerity there, then.
Reeves is being portrayed as the experienced woman who can rebuild Britain’s finances, largely on the grounds that she worked for the Bank of England after leaving university. That’s a bit like putting me in charge of WH Smith because I once had a paper round.
And it is also worth reminding ourselves that Martha was running the retail mortgage department at HBoS (Halifax Bank of Scotland) when it became the second biggest banking collapse in British history and had to be taken over by Lloyds TSB.
Her own financial record is not without blemish, either. For instance, in 2015 she had her official House of Commons credit card suspended after racking up more than £4,000 of ‘invalid’ spending on expenses.
Last year, she published a book aimed at boosting her credentials, called The Women Who Made Modern Economics. An investigation by the Financial Times discovered it was a cut-and-paste job. She had downloaded some of it unacknowledged from the internet, including the notoriously unreliable Wikipedia.
Listening to her speech to the Labour Conference yesterday, it sounded as if she could have lifted half of that from the internet, too. An uninspiring pyramid of platitudes, with a bit of class hatred thrown in for good measure to keep the groundings happy.
None of it sounded to me like a blueprint for rebuilding Britain. Just a programme designed to punish the ‘rich’ and appease the unions, which it won’t. Halfway through her speech, the nurses’ union rejected a 5.5 per cent pay offer as they seek the same inflation-busting deal as junior doctors and train drivers.
I gave up going to Spurs when they refused to stop taking the knee, that fatuous pro-Black Lives Matter gesture imported from the US, writes Richard Littlejohn
What sticks in the craw of many people is her decision to axe the £300 winter fuel payment to millions of pensioners – especially as it has subsequently been revealed that Reeves herself claimed £4,400 towards her own domestic heating bills from the taxpayer on her Parliamentary exes. So no ‘black hole’ in the Reeves family finances.
Naturally, she insists this was all ‘in the rules’, the latest, legalistic Labour mantra. Pixie-Balls Cooper trotted out that line in an interview with the Mail on Sunday’s Glen Owen, while managing to portray herself as haughtily disapproving of her colleagues accepting largesse from donors and friends.
This is the same Pixie Balls-Cooper who, with her former MP husband Ed Balls was among the most notorious beneficiaries of the Westminster expenses scandal.
They flipped their address three times, claiming that their house in Yorkshire was their ‘main home’, even though they lived most of the time in London, where their kids went to school. This allowed them to max out their exes and service a monster mortgage.
In 2007-2008, they claimed almost £310,000 in expenses and £24,438 between them under the additional cost allowance for their London home. All within the rules, natch.
My guess is that there’s still more to come from the Labour gravy train, although the next MP in the ducking stool will inevitably insist, too, that everything is ‘within the rules’. And because they self-identify as ‘good’ and ‘moral’ people, they have convinced themselves they can do no wrong.
One of the new buzzwords coined by this Government is ‘presenteeism’, used by the business secretary to describe what used to be known as ‘turning up for work’.
The real ‘presenteeism’ is the willingness of senior Labour politicians to allow themselves to be showered with presents from friends and donors like Waheed Alli.
I gave up going to Spurs when they refused to stop taking the knee, that fatuous pro-Black Lives Matter gesture imported from the US, whose most prominent exponent was Keir Starmer.
Now he’s Prime Minister, Starmer has discovered there’s no end of donors, lobbyists and corporate sponsors queueing up to take the knee to him. And up until now, he has shown no compunction when it comes to filling his boots.
One nil to the Arsenal, £107,000 to the Starmers.