I started to notice it on X or, as everyone but Elon calls it, Twitter.
I know, I know Twitter is not the real world. Despite its incessant online buzz, millions of people either, only dip in for the ‘cute’ pet photos, or don’t use it at all.
However, for people like me, occasionally hunting the Westminster bubble for the nuggets of information that fly around it, Twitter is like a long strand of a spider’s web. It can vibrate an alert when some issue gets caught up in it.
Well it twanged good and proper when I spotted emergency ‘rescue’ defences to what has now become #freegearkeir
When I’d tracked the comments down, I watched in astonished amazement at an online display of intellectual and moral gymnastics that, had it been a month earlier, would surely have secured a gold medal for team GB.
Our competitors in the high-stakes-hot-takes Twitterverse will be known to many of you. You’ve seen the type: furiously defensive for years about their total impartiality whilst displaying a level of bias that would astonish a spirit level.
“Alert! ‘Hypocritics’ cartwheeling in the open.”
On this occasion they were attempting to stand arguments on their head, desperate to explain why a story about the new Labour Prime Minister – was no story at all.
Lots of ‘clever’ variations of: ‘Nothing to see here. Move along quietly.’
The story was of course about the gifts of clothing and accessories that Sir Keir and Lady Starmer had accepted, and had not initially declared, from a Labour peer and retail magnate who had a pass to No 10 Downing Street – but now doesn’t.
Plenty of column inches have been expended already on the details so I will not add to them here – because that misses the point, and missing the point, as it happens, is another thing the Prime Minister is good at.
Remember the anger he admitted to feeling in a TV interview during the election when he suggested a member of an election debate audience had laughed at his father being a ‘tool maker’- it never seemed to occur to him that nobody was ‘disrespecting’ his father at all. It was the son they were laughing at – for endlessly banging on about it.
For what it’s worth, I have no idea what his, or anyone else’s, father’s profession, is really supposed to tell us worthwhile about their son, or daughter – it’s a habit they should all drop but I’ll leave that bugbear of mine for another time.
The point I’m making, with reference to free clothing, is:
It’s the hypocrisy, not the frocks.
In their first days in office, having turfed the Conservatives out, with a huge landslide, Labour, who’d campaigned about all the ‘change’ they brought, implemented one of those many policies they didn’t bother to tell anyone about beforehand.
They unveiled their “Hypocritic-oath”:
“We hereby solemnly swear to shamelessly do things we’ve spent years attacking the Conservative party for. Also, our loyal supporters will henceforth and with high passion explain why it’s completely fine when we do it, but not when said Conservatives do.”
Double standards in politics are nothing new nor confined to one party, I know that. I also know that often the issues are, in-and-of-themselves, and in the wider scheme of things, sometimes trivial to the public – but overt hypocrisy is not.
It erodes public trust as much as the actions originally criticised. It was hypocrisy that was at the heart of why ‘Partygate’ hurt the Tories so much.
Remember I said it’s not the frocks. It’s not, on their own. But the impartial civil service’s chief inquisitor into Partygate quite soon after delivering her report, popped up as a potential political appointee to the leading opponent of the Prime Minister she’d investigated.
Now, the ‘Gray Eminence’ is reported to have accepted no less than £3000 more in salary than the 167 thousand pounds the new Prime Minister gets, to be his Chief of Staff- whilst apparently insisting other Labour special advisers get less than their Tory counterparts did. The cost of living isn’t quite the crisis for a chosen few in No 10, it would seem.
However, it’s the hypocrisy, not the money.
Until May this year, I had the unhappy task of wading through hundreds of Freedom of Information questions produced, on an industrial scale, by some in the Labour Party, targeting the Foreign Office.
All of them were ‘phishing’ for the slightest hint of Tory government profligacy. They found relatively few in their net, and those they did, they will probably incur themselves. Of course, it is oft ignored that it also cost the taxpayer thousands of pounds to investigate and respond to the majority of requests that weren’t what Labour had hoped for.
My favourite, asked how much wine was served at a certain dinner in London? They just about managed not to ask ‘and was it delivered by suitcase?’ but that was always the underlying context.
It turned out the dinner was hosted by Ministers and officials from the UK and another country to celebrate the final conclusion of a bilateral agreement. The whole meal cost just over two thousand pounds. That sounds a lot in opposition. In Government, the agreement was worth over a billion to the UK economy.
I digress.
Many of these ‘FOIs’ revolved around the use of a official UK Government plane.
“The Spruce Goose” as a close colleague nick-named it, can fly to multiple destinations in days, in a way commercial schedules don’t allow and Secretary of State schedules require. The flight crew are security cleared, and the plane has secure communications, allowing it to be a fully working flying-office in a way no commercial flight could ever be.
The union flag is proudly displayed on the tail fin. It looked particularly splendid when it dropped President Zelensky in Paris to meet President Macron in February last year.
In opposition, Labour performatively decried the use of that plane. Extravagance, luxury, and a complete disregard for ‘working people’ were among a battery of phrases deployed by, then, opposition MPs.
Just days into Government and Labour politicians had used not just the Government plane, but other official planes at their disposal.
It’s the hypocrisy, not the planes.
We’ve allowed ourselves as a polity to get into a cycle that damages politics and politicians, and hypocrisy is the issue here. It’s an unedifying game of: “I see your wallpaper and raise you clothing. I point at your pay and now raise mine. I condemn your use of something that I have every intention of using myself.”
The rule of the bubble is anything that has more than three examples in quick succession – is a ‘trend’. Those are hard to shake off. Conservatives learned that, to their cost, in July.
Far be it for me to disturb the new Labour Government in the midst of making mistakes, but in giving them a slow hand clap for hypocrisy I am suggesting they’d be wise to stop it as soon as possible.