Why Keir Starmer’s vanity is proving his undoing

We meet Rich at the start of the play as an indigent young lawyer of weak ­character, begging More for permanent employment. More refuses to find a place for him, and Rich falls into bad company, becoming a creature of the mercurial King Henry’s new enforcer Thomas Cromwell.

In Robert Bolt’s version of the story, Cromwell induces Rich to perjure himself to incriminate More for treason. In the film, he’s played by a young John Hurt, ­under a thin moustache, suddenly togged up in silks and satins.

Having loyally borne false witness against his old mentor, as Rich exits the stage, More notices a bright new chain of office hangs about Rich’s neck. It bears the red dragon: Y Ddraig Goch. For services rendered, Rich is to be made ­attorney-general for Wales.

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“Why Richard,” More says, “It profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world – but for Wales?”

The first instinct of most actors is to play the moment sarcastically, as an easy ­laugh at the expense of our Celtic ­cousins. But in the 1966 film of the play, Paul ­Schofield made a different and much more interesting dramatic choice.

He played the moment straight and sad, losing the laugh but gaining pathos. “But for Wales?” Schofield says, sadly, ­leaving the well-dressed young man with all his ­material gains, and his compromised ­conscience, and More to the ­inevitability of the king’s vengeance and the ­headsman. The reading amplified what the joke couldn’t – that Rich’s ill-gotten bling at once social exalted and spiritually ­diminished him.

That’s drama. This is life. In the UK this weekend, Sir Keir Starmer’s ­reputation feels equally balanced between the ­temptation to reach for the easy laugh line and ­reckoning with the sheer tawdriness of finding out we have a new Prime ­Minister who can’t even dress himself without ­corporate ­sponsorship.

A wealthy man, we’re endlessly ­reassured, must be decent and public-spirited ­character has splurged the better part of £20,000 of other people’s money on his family wardrobe and almost £80,000 on top of that on sundry freebies, gratuities, days oot, holidays and other tokens of ­esteem from the friendly world of corporate finance.

Labour’s defence of the PM’s most ­recent lapse in political judgement has ­become increasingly ratty as the week progressed. Some Labour supporters have found themselves privately ­repeating one of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s most ­famous lines.

“We know of no spectacle so ­ridiculous as the British public in one of its ­periodical fits of morality” – ­complaining that the new government has been the ­victim of press double standards, that ­being concerned about these kinds of sums is small-minded and superficial, and, most audaciously, that Sir Keir was really doing a fine civic thing by finding external funders for his sensible brogues, dutiful y-fronts and figure-hugging gilets.

And I haven’t even mentioned the glasses. Apparently the PM’s – also funded to the tune of a couple of thousand by Lord Alli – “embody a sense of laid-back luxury and understated elegance”, which suggests there is such a thing as luxury being too laid-back, and elegance being too understated. Should’ve gone to Specsavers.

A sample of the tried-tested-and-failed lines of defence for all this have ­included: All politicians cash in freebies. Why shouldn’t our leaders look good? Why doesn’t a Prime Minister’s wife have ­access to a grant of public funds to pay for official outfits? And in the absence of the same, what’s wrong with milking an apparently willing and enthusiastic donor for tens of thousands of pounds for new gear and a personal shopper, in exchange for nothing more than a kind word and unrestricted access to 10 Downing Street?

When the philosophers suggested we should all try to walk a mile in another man’s shoes, I’m really not sure this is what they had in mind.

Until this week, I hadn’t realised that walking a mile – whoever may own the shoes he’s walking in – is also something the new Prime Minister has shown a consistent aversion to over the course of his career in public life. Sir Keir, with some justification, often makes a merit of his experiences as England’s most senior prosecutor before entering politics.

However, he tends not to mention the flair for the finer things in life he showed in this post, ratchetting up around £250k worth of expenses during his time at the CPS. This extended to demands for ­private chauffeurs for his four-mile trip to work, first-class travel by air and rail, and other up-class services charged to the ­public purse – all of which seem in ­keeping with the Labour leader’s more ­recent efforts to prove he’s intensely ­relaxed about benefitting personally from the money of the super-rich.

Conscious that these lines of defence were not holding, Downing Street has ­announced that Starmer will no ­longer take donations for clothes, as if the ­Labour leader once maintained an open black bin bag outside Downing Street, ­allowing ­Labour-minded grannies – if such specimens of humanity continue to exist these days – popping in a pair of home-darned socks into the pile, to keep Sir Keir’s extremities warm as he conspires to square a message of change with his other promise of fiscal stasis and more efficient continuity.

(Image: Stefan Rousseau/PA)

That, I’m afraid, is the problem with priggery. You live and die by it politically. If you make a pitch for the role of the stern moralist – and if you hope to keep that self-denying, restrained, public-spirited figure of yourself persisting untarnished in the public imagination – you really have to avoid any unapologetic displays of ostentation. That’s why it is no real defence for Starmer’s apologists to point – legitimately – to the scale of freebies, junkets and handouts enjoyed by Keir Starmer’s Tory predecessors in Number 10. Your good name is binary.

“Because you’re worth it” isn’t just the slogan of the root-boosters over at L’Oréal. It’s also the first maxim of all corruption in public and private life. ­Convince yourself that you are the special one, and that all your special gifts require special treatment – and it only makes sense when your social world showers you with rewards.

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Some of the madder factions of ­evangelical American Christianity call this kind of thing the Prosperity ­Gospel, where it is a sign of God’s grace for ­individuals to acquire flipping great ­wadges of cash. It is the logical end point of believing in the Protestant work ethic, I suppose. If you are already minted, ­notion your good fortune is God’s vindication.

Scratch most human organisations, and you’ll find this impulse at work somewhere, out of sight, giving permission for all the small corruptions which have a habit of escalating into bigger ones. The overworked middle manager who fiddles their expenses often picks up the impulse for a little fraud from the sense they deserve more than their employer is giving them, rationalised against the unofficial ethical benchmark that everybody is doing it.

A volunteer with a charity who devotes hours of work to the organisation, while the salaried staffer does sod all might be forgiven a little resentful reflection on the contributions they’ve made to the cause. And so, with only a little twist of ­morality, they might persuade themselves the uncollected wine bottle left over at the end of the tombola deserves a home in my kitchen, after all the work I did setting up the event.

Because I’m worth it, the ­rationalising braincells say, distilling that sense of ­entitlement – of justification – which gives most kinds of corruption its first ­encouraging nudge out into the world.