to believe Lady Starmer should pay for her own clothes and personal stylists?

I doubt any NHS occupational health professionals, which is Victoria Starmer’s job part time I believe, are on any fraction of a salary that allows them to buy formal clothes for public events potentially multiple times a day every day of the week. Like if they go on a visit to another place as PM wife.

Starmer paid tax on earnings of £404,030 in 2023, according to The Guardian - that's before he got a pay hike as PM. I think he can afford to pay for formal clothes for his family, if his job makes them necessary.

Yea. and the way they have treated Diane Abbott is a disgrace.

Unfortunately they are all the same. Greedy

if politicians didn't lie they wouldn't be politicians. It's part of the job description.

I can just imagine trying to claim for my late wife's clothes as a perk for my job. I'd be crucified by HMRC.

Being a PM’s wife or husband and then never going to events with the PM is absolutely not how the PM spouse role is done, sorry. Never has been. Everyone knows that it’s routinely expected that the PM’s wife or husband will appear with the PM together as a couple at key occasions.

And what’s your point with saying we don’t have a First Lady? What role do you think that is? You do know that First Ladies aren’t elected..? FL is just the American title for the wife of the President, because they’ve only ever elected men with wives so far, just the same as VS is the spouse of the UK PM.

And I don’t think anyone else is losing any sleep about VS annual leave status. She’s part time in her job as is well known

@CurrentHun there is no position of first lady in the U.K, we just elect a party and therefore a prime minister. There is absolutely no need to her to trail about after him, anything she goes to is purely voluntary and I think that on £200,000 or so a year between them they should be just about able to clothes themselves.

For any important evening occasions she could hire dresses.

As an aside, she must be using up her annual leave at a terrible rate, what do staff get, 6 weeks or so?

Genuinely I don’t give a crap about being given or lent free clothes or football match tickets.or getting a free holiday. As long as they’re all declared and Nolan is stuck to. Fine. Then we can decide on the record if they’re problematic perks or not.

I doubt any NHS occupational health professionals, which is Victoria Starmer’s job part time I believe, are on any fraction of a salary that allows them to buy formal clothes for public events potentially multiple times a day every day of the week. Like if they go on a visit to another place as PM wife.

People are being ridiculous about this, I mean is she meant to be rocking up to events in an NHS tabard? I’d very much rather these things were paid for by a rich Labour donor than by the public purse. The ridiculous fuss about just puts smart people off going into politics.

The journalists grilling Rachel reeves on Today yesterday on BBC admitted they had had free tickets with her to go to the Last night of the Proms together with her as guests of the BBC while saying it was all an outrageous perk that she should have gone and that the optics were bad. I really don’t want ministers or a chancellor who don’t get out much either.

Focus on the important stuff of actual undeclared hidden Tory corruption like around procurement. This isn’t it. This is not even ‘running through a field of wheat’ level of bad.

My point was either you truly are hard of understanding...or you know full well why this matters and seek to diminish its importance.

This as well. Cherie Blair was very much Prime Ministers wife as was Carrie. Victoria wants to stay private. I would have thought her role the NHS would have alerted her t the problem of gifts.

I absolutely wanted a change of government. Labour were as good as any. I am not impressed so far. 5 million homes is great but so far the plan is reactive depressing urban sprawl. After so much time in opposition I'd have thought fresh positivity would be high on the agenda.

Lady Starmer does not seem to want to play a prominent role as politician's spouse. She did not appear at many events during the election or do photo calls with children entering Downjng St. I am at a loss what she needs clothes from a political donor for. If, in the future, she needs one off dresses for specific events, she should hire like Carrie Johnson did. Much more environmentally ethical.

Surely the point of the value isn’t cleaning, laundry, washing up, etc. It’s the cost that would have been incurred if a person had had to pay for the equivalent benefit, isn’t it?

If a politician is friendly with someone who has a private box at football or owns a yacht or a penthouse, they declare the value of the gift of use, don’t they?

I may be wrong, but I can’t see any other way it could work. Otherwise AR wouldn’t have declared anything, not even £250. And being friendly with a hugely rich person would mean you’d never have to declare any expensive entertainment, holiday, use of a flashy car, private jet, meals, drinks or whatever.

It’s long overdue and I don’t understand why the government didn’t see this coming, or having not seen it coming why they didn’t get on the front foot when it blew up. As far as I know, the only concession that’s been made is that Starmer, Reeves and Rayner won’t accept donations for clothes. Travel, entertaining and football are still fair game aren’t they?

They have real opportunity to get the electorate and the party onside again, but it’ll take decisive, bold action quickly. I’d advocate for no donations to individuals, just parties. Complete transparency of how much, by whom and when. And regular reporting by the parties on the deployment of funds. Anything received / used personally to be taxed as a benefit in kind. Then at least we would know that we were all in it together. If that means Starmer has to skip the football, well, that’s life. All leaders have to sacrifice something at some point, either for the greater good or for longer term gains. And lord knows it’s hard to find a poor ex prime minister - except perhaps Truss, who barely counts as a PM at all ;)

He’s not saying anything various Labour voters haven’t said on these threads lately. Which broadcasters are sympathetic to Labour? I can’t think of any.

I was surprised to see John Curtice write a rather robust article about Starmer and his failings

I recall he was cited fairly often as someone who knew the polling pre GE and he got a fair bit of airtime with sympathetic to Labour broadcasters

"Transforming a low-trust society isn’t easy at the best of times. The last few weeks of media coverage of Labour ministers having their freebies wrestled from them and not getting what all the fuss is about won’t have helped Starmer’s imagine of stolid rectitude one bit. But the ingredients are well known – transparency and accountability, public services that deliver, devolution of power to the lowest level, social inclusion and ethical leadership. Above all else, though, is competence. The mood of the nation is that nothing works properly any more and the public realm is stuffed with useless people on high salaries who are disconnected from the social and economic corrosion outside the Zone 1 bubble."

The quotation above, from CapX today, primarily about the low levels of trust in UK society, and how most people no longer expect public services to operate properly, gets quite close to summing up how the UK feels. Of course, much of the disillusionment stems from a decade's worth of cost-paring, but the new government is closing on its first 100 days deadline and round up, and the removal of the WFA from so many not wealthy pensioners, when compared to the amount of winter fuel support for RoI pensioners, following quoted from the Telegraph..."It means Irish retirees with an income of £22,308 or less can receive around £750 every year to heat their homes, while British pensioners with an income of £11,500 are now not entitled to a penny."

I don't think the media are going to mince their words.

The hypocrisy is so obvious, in a way I am more sympathetic of Boris Johnson as he couldn't take the wall paper with him. The buying of clothes looks bad even its in the rules - having said that had Angela Rayner suddenly been dressed very conservatively in clothes which were business like and clearly for work I would have more sympathy but when she appeared dressed in her bright green trouser suit it clearly wasn't in my view "for work clothes."

Crymeastream564
Remember Carrie’s makeover of their Downing Street flat
The difference is that the Downing Street flat had already been made over recently when Carrie got her hands on it so that makeover was entirely frivolous!
Theresa May was able to manage with what was already there!

If Theresa May managed with what was there already, then a 2010 redecoration is not very recent.

The real difference with your example is that the Johnsons were forced to confront their frivolity and they refunded the donors for the makeover in 2021. Once they had done this they were entitled to be frivolous with their own money. Many of the items were removable (sofas, lamps, rugs etc.) - presumably they took at least some items with them when they left Downing Street.

That might have been how they began but they’ve now said no more, not least because so many Labour voters are furious with them.. I really hope the rules are changed and they do it quickly. It would be very easy to cap personal donations and specify how they can be used.

I don't. Because it's abundantly clear that they really don't think they have done anything wrong. Not from a following the rules on reporting, which eventually most, but not all, of them have done, but at from a 'does it pass the sniff test' point of view. They believe they are entitled to do what they have done, and they can't believe that the public are doubting them.

All of them, Starmer, Reeves and Rayner are effectively gaslighting the electorate. "but politicians have always accepted gifts"; "but its all within the rules"; "but we have been too transparent"... If this was a relationship question on mumsnet the overwhelming responses would be LTB!!

The costs are higher when the property is used.

Its not right, and I’m
sure her staff are tearing their hair out in despair.

How naive can a middle aged politician be? Was it his first day?

Blair was a politician through and through. Starmer isn't. I trust though that if he believes the rules need a re-write to provide abundant clarity, then that's most likely what he'll do.

Some things never change though...it's quite interesting reading this Guardian article of almost 20 years ago, when Blair was on his way out, and noting that for the Labour party not much has really changed in their attitude to donors.

Indeed, this quote, lifted from the article, is as pertinent today as it was in 2006...

"In his early period in office, it was almost plausible to explain New Labour's damaging embroilments with rich men as the product of naivety on the part of a man who had never held any government office before he became Prime Minister"

Except, while not holding Government office, Starmer was DPP and so should have know better than to repeat the mistakes of his predecessor.

Tony Blair has squandered his own legacy on sleaze | Andrew Rawnsley | The Guardian

If Starmer and co are guilty of anything, it's probably being politically naive. You could argue their biggest mistake was in declaring these things/ seeking clarity around what to declare and being too transparent. The major issue that Labour supporters had with the previous regime was that they knew full well what the rules were, broke them (multiple times) anyway and then lied about whether or not the rules had been broken. See Dom Cummings' eye test.

Starmer and co almost immediately recognised how it looks and said they'd no longer accept them. Two very different leadership style reactions to similar situations, so in many ways the wallpaper/ football tickets & clothes scenarios are a totally fals equivalence. The Electoral Commission investigated the wallpaper scenario and promptly slapped a fine on the Tory Party for wrong doing.

We either want our politicians to follow the rules, or we don't. I don't think anyone should be criticised for adhering to rules. If the rules are wrong (they might be), then that's a different matter and they should change - for everyone.

Apparently. Who cares? 🤷‍♀️