The Week in Storytelling: 30th September, 2024
Why the coverage of donors and gifts to Labour MPs is getting silly.
Here’s a pub quiz question for you. Can you remember why Liam Fox was forced to resign as the UK’s Defence Secretary in 2011?
I’m willing to bet you can’t for any number of completely valid reasons. You are not a mad political obsessive like the guy who writes this newsletter. You don’t live in the UK and who the f**k is Liam Fox? It was fourteen and a half years ago, why would you be expected to remember? And what kind of boring pub quiz is this anyway?
Liam Fox was the first Defence Secretary in a coalition government that David Cameron’s Conservatives formed with the Liberal Democrats in 2010. Just over a year later, Fox was forced to resign after it emerged that Adam Werritty, a lobbyist, had met him on 18 foreign trips despite having no official role.
Questions were also raised about who paid for Mr Werritty's business activities and whether he had personally benefited from his frequent access to Fox.
As scandals go, it was fairly ephemeral. Fox resigned, Cameron appointed a new one and, four years later, Cameron won another election.
And that’s the truth of most political scandals. They are fairly ephemeral. Unless you took a country to war on shaky intelligence, held secret parties during a COVID-19 lockdown or authorised the burglary of your political opponents’ party headquarters, chances are that most voters will forget about most scandals.
Flash forward fourteen years and the new Labour administration led by Keir Starmer is enduring its first scandal.
I briefly touched on it in my article last week but for anyone who didn’t read that edition, here’s a brief summary of the scandal and the key players in the story.
Keir Starmer and a number of his Cabinet ministers are under fire for having taken generous gifts and freebies. Many of these have come from one man - the Labour peer and donor Lord Waheed Alli.
Lord Alli has, in the past 18 months or so.
Gifted money to Keir Starmer and his wife, Victoria, to help them buy clothes and glasses. The clothing donations now come to in excess of £32,000
Allowed the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, to stay in his penthouse in New York.
Allowed Starmer’s son to use one of his London properties to study for his GCSEs (the equivalent of £20,000 worth of accommodation)
Paid towards the 40th birthday party of Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary.
Allowed his properties in London to be used for Labour Party campaign planning and, on one occasion, for the recording of Starmer’s official Christmas message.
Then there’s a separate, but related story surrounding Starmer’s use of a corporate box at Arsenal.
Starmer, a lifelong Arsenal supporter and season ticket holder is unable to sit in the stands for security reasons. Arsenal have therefore given Starmer, his security detail and his family access to a corporate box. According to Robert Peston, the political editor of ITV News, the average cost of one of these boxes per game are £8,750.
It doesn’t stop there. Stories have emerged of MPs receiving free tickets to Taylor Swift concerts.
The narrative in the media is nearly unanimous. The optics of this don’t look good.
It looks like Labour ministers receiving generous gifts and donations at a time when the new government is taking the Winter Fuel Allowance away from as many as 10 million pensioners and talking about making further ‘difficult decisions’ with public spending. It looks like one rule for the Labour government and one rule for everyone else.
What’s more, Starmer has chosen to define his new government as a government of ‘service’. But having defined Labour as the polar opposite of a corrupt, intellectually bankrupt Conservative Party, even the appearance of Labour MPs receiving thousands of pounds worth of freebies makes the new government seem hypocritical.
It’s a distraction that Labour doesn’t need. As I wrote on Thursday, if the media can’t see a narrative about the government’s direction of travel, it will fill the void with other stories too.
Labour’s communications strategy in the aftermath of these revelations has been flat-footed. Ministers have been sent into broadcast interviews with no single line to take and some of the defences offered up by members of the Cabinet haven’t sounded great in the current circumstances.
For instance Wes Streeting, the Health and Social Care Secretary, has argued that it’s a good thing that generous benefactors want to give large amounts of money to politicians. Angela Rayner’s defence was that ‘all MPs do it’ (a defence that probably sounded better in her head).
The story has cut through to the public, with Starmer’s approval rating plummeting in recent days (he’s now less popular than Rishi Sunak).
Here’s the catch. No ministers have actually broken any rules.
Starmer and his ministers have declared the donations in the MP’s register of interests. This technically isn’t a scandal as there technically hasn’t been any impropriety. MPs are just making use of existing Parliamentary rules.
Yet most of the media have been treating it like a scandal anyway.
In interview after interview, Labour minister after Labour minister has been taken to task on ‘how it looks’ to have MPs accepting such generous donations and freebies. New stories about donations or free accommodation from Lord Alli are released as exclusives in newspapers.
Two things can be true at the same time. While Labour’s acceptance of donations and freebies in tough economic times is careless at best and foolish at worst, the coverage of the so-called ‘donor-gate’ story is becoming moralistic and downright silly.
Other, more substantive stories are competing with it for airtime. It’s frequently placed at the top of the news agenda alongside other, more substantive stories such as the escalating conflict between Israel and Lebanon. The story almost derailed the Labour Party conference, often crowding out other discussions surrounding policy.
Westminster journalists would likely push back and argue that Labour brought this on themselves. Starmer and his top team haven’t considered the optics of how this looks to the general public.
To justify the continued ‘exclusive’ reporting of what is ultimately the same revelation over and over again (that Lord Alli keeps giving Labour MPs free stuff), Westminster journalists have pushed two key narratives.
“Can’t you see what this looks like?”
I’ve heard numerous political editors ask this question to Labour MPs in interviews. The entire premise of this story is predicated on what it looks like and not what it is.
Most would argue (and many have) that in contemporary politics, optics is everything. The appearance of impropriety is as important as impropriety itself.
But placing too much emphasis on public perception over ethical behaviour is dangerous in an age where genuinely corrupt politicians try to claim moral equivalence with their flawed, but ultimately well-meaning political opponents.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, it was common for people on Twitter to retweet stories of his latest lie, scandal or impropriety along with three words: “BUT HER EMAILS”
This was a reference to the number of times during the 2016 election that equivalency was drawn between Hillary Clinton’s improper use of her email server and the many, many examples of Trump’s blatant corruption.
I was disappointed to hear the normally peerless political editor of Sky News, Beth Rigby, refer to the gift/freebie scandal as ‘continuity Johnson’.
Again, Westminster journalists would argue that the public doesn’t differentiate between Labour and the Conservatives - they just see corruption as corruption.
But journalists are there to report the news, not hurl moral platitudes at politicians on the public’s behalf.
(While I’ve make no secret of my antipathy towards Boris Johnson, I also thought it was pointless when Rigby cornered him and asked him he wanted to apologise to the Queen for the fact that people were having parties in Downing Street while she was observing COVID-19 social distancing rules during the funeral for her husband, Prince Philip. What is the point of an interview like that?)
Labour are hypocrites
A second, related justification that I’ve heard journalists give for continuing to keep the story in the news is that Labour are guilty of gross hypocrisy.
As I touched upon earlier, Starmer’s campaign in the run up to the general election was predicated on the idea that he would return standards and service to public life.
The fact that the new government appear to have fallen short of these standards after only three months in office exemplifies a common criticism of the Labour Party - that they occupy a higher moral ground than everyone else.
To its political opponents, this moral superiority is often irritating. Many Conservatives doubtless feel an element of schadenfreude as they watch the shine come off Starmer’s halo.
I can’t fully disagree with this. Labour’s moral superiority during the Corbyn years was particularly unjustified when the party was facing accusations of anti-Semitism. We can’t pretend that Labour and the wider labour movement doesn’t have its own history of genuine corruption and scandal. The political left’s biggest Achilles heel is that it thinks it’s more intrinsically virtuous than the political right.
But we need to be clear that hypocrisy is not the same as corruption.
I’ve heard some journalists make the important point that the Tories’ corruption actually resulted in laws being broken.But too many journalists have relied on that over-used word: optics. Labour look like hypocrites and that’s all the public apparently care about.
We also need to be honest about the fact that there are hypocrites in the press too.
Only one political podcast, The News Agents, has bothered to have a full and frank discussion about the fact that journalists also get offered lots of freebies and that, on a number of the occasions when politicians were given free tickets to events, journalists were there as well.
And while Labour’s moral superiority might be irritating, let’s be honest about all the times it’s held to a different standard by a mainly right-wing media.
I’ve heard some people argue that some stories need a critical mass before journalists will give them their full attention. It’s true that, when it became apparent Boris Johnson had hosted parties in Downing Street in breach of lockdown rules, he was subjected to relentless press scrutiny.
But there were stories of his blatant corruption and predilection for accepting gifts and donations for years prior to so-called ‘Partygate’.
Many of these stories were covered, but were often lost in the friendly coverage he received from newspapers like The Telegraph, The Sun and The Daily Mail. It’s heartening to see journalists who have suddenly rediscovered their ethics over donations and gifts after years of covering for Johnson.
I’m as morally outraged as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore
The endless moralising over donations and gifts would be worthwhile if we were discussing how the system governing donations and gifts should be governed
But we’re not going to.
The narrative with the ‘optics’ of MPs taking gifts and donations feeds into a bigger story about voter antipathy towards MPs. This mistrust reaches back to the scandal surrounding MPs’ expenses fifteen years ago.
Robert Blackstock: Are you really the best we’ve got?
Most voters already believe that MPs are venal, corrupt and overpaid. As recently as 2020, polling revealed that two thirds of voters believed MPs should take a pay cut, with many thinking that MPs earn over £100,000 (it’s closer to £91,000 as of 2024).
But the cost of becoming an MP is already prohibitively expensive. According to a report by The Independent in 2018
*Conservative candidates who won in such constituencies were found to have spent an average £121,467, while those who lost still spent £18,701. For Labour, the average personal cost of taking a marginal was £19,022, with candidates who failed were set back even more: £35,843.*
So it begs the question: how do you ban or restrict gifts or donations without pricing people out of politics?
The outrage over gifts and donations is rooted in a simplistic sentiment that says MPs shouldn’t receive special treatment. Why should the Prime Minister be allowed access to a corporate box without paying for it?
The answer to this is pretty simple: because he’s the Prime Minister. Private citizens don’t require security protection. It’s not hypocrisy for the elected leader of a country to make different arrangements when he wants to go to a football match. It’s just logistics.
We want our elected leaders to be gifted communicators, competent managers, visionary leaders. MPs are often expected to be social workers, communication experts, economists and constitutional lawyers all in one. Many are not up to the task. A small handful are corrupt or useless. The same could also be said of most people.
Of course we should talk about how our politicians are paid and funded. Transparency is key. Labour can’t afford to mess this up when trust in politics is so high.
But let’s not pretend the media cares about these wider issues right now. In the aftermath of eight years where politics has been a rollercoaster of Brexit deals, pandemics and kamikaze mini-budgets, many Westminister journalists don’t seem to know what to do now we have a reasonably boring government in power.
We should expect them to breeze past the boring technicalities of policy. Sometimes the ‘optics’ make a more interesting story.
But more importantly, they aren’t these aren’t stories that will define this Prime Minister. You remember David Cameron as the man gambled on an EU referendum and lost. That’s it. That’s the story.
Did you remember the name of his first Defence Secretary? I didn’t think so.
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