I see you, Bridget Phillipson.
Right! Come on then, let’s go on Sky and just get it over with. Let’s rip the plaster off, draw a line under all this silly nonsense and get a head start on conference week without needing to spend all of it fending off another bunch of distracting headlines about gifts and freebies. I mean really, what’s all the fuss about anyway? Gifts are just part and expensively wrapped parcel of modern politics, aren’t they? So long as everything’s declared and well within the rules, surely none of this will appear hopelessly out of touch and utterly detached from Joe Public’s everyday struggles.
Even if it does, you can handle it, can’t you? This is the new government, the one selflessly returning politics to the people - surely their highly skilled and professional comms team are all over this. We’ve all seen how easy it was for the Tories to explain away a slightly awkward birthday party as a works event, and you weren’t even ambushed with a cake. This should be a piece of piss - you declared it all properly and your parents weren’t even there, so that 14k Waheed Ali spent on your 40th shindig definitely wasn’t just cash for access by some other name.
The toe-curling cringe of the endless embarrassing excuses on the morning media rounds should be a thing of the past now. Never again will we see a minister offering some lame justification for a practice that’s widely perceived as brazen corruption. Never again will we watch them umm and ahh before awkwardly suggesting that it’s somehow in the public interest. Never again will we then see the government quietly announce that it’s ending the practice being widely perceived as brazen corruption two days later. Smashed it, David Lammy. It is important that Keir Starmer’s wife look her very best. At the Eras tour. For the country. But we won’t be doing that any more, even though it was definitely fine at the time.
The rotating cast of Tory apologists trying to spin every hopelessly out of touch misstep and scandal has been jettisoned, replaced instead with… erm… a rotating cast of Labour apologists instead. Except the Labour apologists aren’t really apologising, and actually seem rather confused than so many voters aren’t too keen at the thought of donors showering our politicians with gifts in exchange for access and influence. My, what a pleasant taste this all leaves in our mouths, like we’ve all just collectively blown a peat bog mummy to its horrifying completion. Yum - it tastes so dreadfully familiar!
The knives are well and truly out for Labour already and look, I’m not naive. I don’t for a second believe that the current rightwing press outrage over the gifting scandal is anything other than selective, or that it’s in any way a uniquely Labour problem. Relatively speaking it’s absolute chicken feed compared to the absolute profligacy and outright cronyism of the dying gasps of the Tory government but that’s not the point here.
The point is that chicken feed or not, it is deeply insulting to those of us now being told we have to make sacrifices. More importantly, we were promised (lol Starmer) some actual change. We were supposed to be done with all this nonsense. Any own goal from Labour that allows the tabloid ghouls in the rightwing press and the Russian bot accounts on social media to paint this new government as more of the same is just a completely needless gift of their own to the populists on the far right.
Whether it’s within the rules or not doesn’t matter when the optics are so dreadful, and certainly not when it is our politicians who decide the rules that govern their conduct in the first place. It also becomes a whole other scandal in itself when it appears to be a perk of the job that Keir Starmer himself very much enjoys to the point of absurdity.
The fact that he seems so utterly miffed at the suggestion that maybe he should pay for his own hospitality box isn’t exactly helping his everyman image. I can picture him now, wailing like a nasal ghost as he bumps off the walls at Number Ten. Gratuity, gratuity! Where’s their gratitude for me!?
It’s just so offensive, being asked to make financial sacrifices for the good of the country, isn’t it? Excuse me a minute, Bridget Phillipson. I’ve just got to go and slap nan’s hand away from the thermostat.
Can we turn it up a bit for her ninetieth if we call it a work event?
I see you, Bridget Phillipson. I fucking see you.
Heads on spikes is the only message clear enough to the next bunch of thieving fuckers who fancy their chances as profiteering traitors
The trough is deep. Excellent piece👏👏👏