If he wasn’t still alive, spin doctor Alastair Campbell would be turning in his grave at the PR disaster that developed from a minor image blip on the part of prime minister Keir Starmer over his fondness for accepting freebies.
(For Mr Campbell’s reaction, imagine Malcolm Tucker from “The Thick of It” in free flow. “I think we should use the ‘carrot and stick’ approach. You take a carrot, stick it up his ******** *****, followed by the stick, followed by an even bigger, rougher carrot”).
As it is, the debacle from a minor news item about a few free suits has ended up with the PM getting the nickname Free Gear Keir, a Trumpian level insult that will not go away, and his wife renamed Lady Victoria Sponge (according to V Furniss, our Reform-ist letter writer), which is just as clever.
The story is not new. “Private Eye” has reported for some time about the Labour leader’s penchant for accepting gifts, but now he’s PM and allegedly writing a new chapter in honesty – his dad was just a tool-maker, did he ever say? – after the corruption and moral turpitude of the last Tory government.
The story is pathetic whichever way you look at it.
It’s pathetic the way the Tory Press has seized on it: Boris Johnson persuaded people to pay for everything, from his veg box to his wedding and his wallpaper. From the sound of it, he is so cheap that he probably leaves his suit pockets stitched up the way they come, because he certainly never seems to get his own wallet out.
Then there’s the billions of pounds the Tories gave to their friends in PPE contracts, Tory MPs voting to shelve a recommendation from the Parliamentary Standards Committee for the former minister Owen Paterson be suspended from the Commons for breaking the rules banning paid lobbying, Robert Jenrick helping Richard Desmond avoid building starter homes and Blackpool South MP Scott Benton suspended after appearing to offer to lobby for gambling investors.
It’s also equally pathetic that Sir Keir has squandered what goodwill he had – and he was never popular as a leader, so that’s not much – over such relatively petty items. And that he was so unaware of the optics to see the damage the reports were causing, coming at a time the Government was talking about depriving pensioners of fuel allowances.
I am much less important than the prime minister (although at journalism college we are taught that local papers are treated more harshly than bigger papers in libel cases just because we are local) but I don’t accept many freebies.
The ones I do accept are on clear terms: PR firms send me free music and I write about it. If I do not, it stops coming.
Sometimes a new restaurant opens and we get tickets for a free meal but I never go, on the off-chance that the restaurant will phone up and call in the favour. I was once actually offered money for a story to go in, and told them to ring the advertising department.
I gave our Corporate World Insider Mr Grumpy a call, and he told me that he had to declare gifts over £50; forms had to be filled in and the gift be assessed as bribery or not by people even higher up the chain than him.
The private sector is quite wary about accepting gifts (and bound by anti-corruption laws) but politicians seem happy to fill their boots as soon as they get a sniff of power.
The fact is nobody gives you anything for nothing: this week’s “Private Eye” notes that Sir Keir started getting tickets to Premier League football games (and he genuinely does like football) about the time Labour started talking about a football regulator to protect fans and smaller clubs, which the Premier League opposes. Funny, that.
Some time ago I listened to a radio documentary about political donations in America. It concluded that donations rarely actually bought anything, but did give donors access to the politicians.
So for example – picking a random topic not related to any real life incidents – a firm making inefficient and dangerous fireproof cladding might donate to a government party and persuade it that tighter regulation was not needed, while the poor sods living in tower blocks clad in the dangerous material would have no access to power.
To be fair to other politicians, “Private Eye’s” latest podcast made the point that Theresa May used to get clothing sent to her and would pick out items she liked, pay for them and return the rest, a practice that Sarah Brown, wife of Gordon, also followed when she was in Downing Street. It is perhaps only comparatively recently that politicians have started dipping into the trough more shamelessly.
Part of the problem is social media and rolling news, which demands clickbait to attract readers all the time, 24 hours a day, not least because it makes them money.
People like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump thrive on this, so are happy to provide plenty of material, as were some of the last crop of Tory ministers, who made up for a lack of talent with an ability to provide constant soundbites for the socials, then picked up by the wider media.
If you listen to LBC phone-ins, they often refer to dramatic moments being quicky edited and put out on the “socials”, which in turn boosts their own social media presence.
Labour – and particularly Sir Keir – does not do this, hence the summer’s silliness over Angela Rayner dancing or DJ-ing; Labour gave away precious little else in the way of clickbait.
But the omnishambles over the PM’s free clothes was clickbait gold, which may explain why it blew up so quickly.
Labour politicians may feel it is unfair, but that’s the world they operate in – and they should have been prepared for it.
And just stop taking free stuff.
