Serving the Servants

Keir Starmer’s Conservative critics may be hypocrites, but the influence of Big Money on his Government should worry us all

Nothing better highlights the extent to which the British media has suddenly started to notice things it spent the past 14 years ignoring, than the sudden interest in the issue of rich people and organisations giving gifts and freebies to senior politicians.

For the uninitiated, this may appear to be something that has only emerged as an issue since Keir Starmer and the Labour party entered Government. 

This impression has been aided by reports, such as this this one by Sky News this week, which suggested that the new Prime Minister received more such freebies than “any other MP” since 2019.

There’s only one slight problem with this. It isn’t true.

A quick look at Sky’s own database of MP hospitality reveals that Starmer’s Conservative predecessor Boris Johnson actually received more than twice as much in gifts and hospitality over the same period as the Labour leader.

Gifts Johnson received included many thousands of pounds in hospitality from the owners of Heathrow airport, free accommodation and holidays from Conservative donors and free flights from Rupert Murdoch.

Yet, aside from a brief flurry of interest in his gold wallpaper a couple of years back, the issue of such freebies never captured half the level of media interest that Starmer’s free specs and Arsenal tickets are registering now.

Among those now finding themselves so concerned about such issues is Johnson’s new employers at the Daily Mail, who conveniently only discovered their concerns about this problem, once he left office.

Yet just because some of those now pursuing Starmer may be hypocrites, it doesn’t mean that this is a non-issue. 

The fact that a Labour Prime Minister, who just months ago was insisting that he would lead a “Government of service” is now defending taking tens of thousands of pounds in corporate hospitality, should raise concerns about who this Government is really set up to serve.

At a time when his Chancellor is stripping fuel payments from pensioners, and preparing us for a new wave of cuts to public services, then Starmer’s own behaviour matters.

Yet as I said on the Byline Podcast this week, the issue of Starmer’s freebies is less about the individual gifts themselves as what it says about the broader direction of the Government under his leadership.

The fact that in the final days before the general election campaign began, the Labour party chose to take an undisclosed £4 million donation from a tax-dodging Cayman Islands based hedge fund should concern us far more than the fact that he got a free pair of glasses and a plush seat at the Emirates. So too should the growing influence of corporate lobbyists on all levels of the party.

Similarly, while Starmer’s financial interests deserve scrutiny, we should also not ignore the interests of the person soon to be his opposite number.

The fact that the man most likely to be the next Conservative party leader, Robert Jenrick, has taken £75,000 from a firm which has no employees, has never made a profit and has £332,000 in debts after taking a loan from an untraceable British Virgin Islands company, should be getting at least a fraction of the sort of coverage that Starmer’s wife being gifted a fancy dress is receiving.

Because the truth is that the issue of the corrupting influence of money in politics matters. It mattered when Boris Johnson was taking free holidays from Conservative donors and a Russian press baron and it matters now that Starmer is benefiting from the largesse of wealthy donors too.

When Starmer was in opposition he promised to turn the page over from the sort of venal politics seen under Johnson. His repeated commitment to restore “service” to Government was undoubtedly the strongest part of his general election campaign.

The truth is that so far he hasn’t delivered on that promise.

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The ‘Best and Brightest’ Myth

Another story that has now captured the interests of our national press is that of the amount of money being paid to senior Government advisers and politicians.

The fact that Starmer’s chief of staff Sue Gray’s salary is broadly the same in real terms as her predecessors under the Conservatives has not prevented this new wave of interest, nor has the fact that many other public servants already earn more than the Prime Minister.

Indeed quite why “paid more than the Prime Minister” is seen as a useful yardstick for anything isn’t clear to me. However, what the row has highlighted once again is the number of otherwise sensible commentators who appear to believe that the occupant of Number 10 is somehow living a life of undeserved penury.

Why this is the case is a curious one. The Prime Minister earns almost £170,000 a year, which puts him comfortably in the top 1-2% of earners. On top of this he receives free central London accommodation, taxpayer funded travel and hospitality and any number of post-Downing Street career opportunities which are worth many more times his basic salary.

Yet despite this, there never seems to be a shortage of people who seem to believe that if only we could pay them a little bit more then all of the nation’s problems would be solved.

Those making this case rely on a series of arguments, none of which stand up to much scrutiny.

The first of these is that the Prime Minister and MPs are somehow getting below the market rate, compared to leaders of other countries. Again, it is not quite clear why this is a useful yardstick. Being Prime Minister is not an open jobs market. Politicians are not moving from one country to another in order to get a better salary as Prime Minister, or President, so this is a fairly meaningless comparison.

However, the related argument here is that if we increased the PM’s salary - say by double - then we would attract much more capable, and less corrupt, people into politics. Pay people more and they won’t be tempted by the corrupting influence of Big Money, seems to be the argument.

Again, it’s not clear what evidence from the real world they are relying upon to argue this. Did Rishi Sunak’s huge personal wealth prevent the PPE scandal, or the issue of contracts going to companies connected to his wife? Did Boris Johnson’s personal wealth prevent his interest in freebies and dodgy donors?

The picture doesn’t look much better outside our borders either. The President of the United States currently earns around twice what the UK Prime Minister does and the job has attracted people who earned much more than that in the world of business.

So has this ended political corruption? Perhaps we should ask billionaire businessman and clean-as-a-whistle former President Donald Trump about that one.

But maybe this is unfair and Trump is a outlier. Maybe if the job of Prime Minister was paid more then we would attract a better class of British business person into the role. But would we really?

Would someone currently being paid huge amounts as a CEO of a major British company really want to quit all of that in order to stand as an MP, before spending years in opposition on the off chance of maybe becoming Prime Minister at some point in the distant future?

Would they really be willing to abandon all of their conflicting business interests and luxury lifestyle, in order to become a jobbing politician, even if we upped the salaries a little bit? It does seem rather unlikely.

Because the truth is that the issue of the quality of our politicians is not really about money at all. The salaries paid to MPs, ministers and Prime Ministers are all more than adequate and put them comfortably among some of the best paid people in the country.

The reason there are not more highly capable people wanting to become politicians is not about the salary, but about the job itself. The reason more people don’t want to become an MP is not because they worry they won’t be paid enough, but because they worry that the job itself will be an unpleasant and insecure one. Who, aside from the most politically fanatical, would choose to devote a large chunk of their working life to a profession which is one of the least trusted in the country, and which mostly seems to involve being a human punch bag for the very people who you have been asked to serve.

Put on top of that the often toxic working environment in Westminster and the fact that your entire career could be brought to an early end every four or five years at the ballot box and it is unsurprising that so few people choose to devote their lives to it.

None of these issues would be solved by paying politicians more money, nor would it be likely to have any meaningful impact on corruption in politics, aside from making it more likely that the sort of people who entered politics would be those who are motivated by money, rather than public service.

Now this is not to say that there is not an issue about low wages in the public sector. The fact that there is such a huge shortage of teachers at the moment is directly due to the long-term cut in real-terms teacher pay over the past decade. Similarly, the only reason that the junior doctor’s strikes have now been brought to an end is because the new Government has stumped up the cash in order to pay them a bit more.

But while teachers and nurses are clearly underpaid, senior politicians are not.

However, unlike senior politicians, the pay of teachers and nurses seems to generate a whole lot less concern, and a whole lot less coverage, than the issue of how much we pay our already well-remunerated MPs and Prime Ministers.