Coffee House Shots
Do the Starmers need a personal shopper?
Subscribe to The Spectator in September and get three months of website and app access absolutely free. Follow the Tory's Leadership Campaign, Labor's Inaugural Budget and the US elections with Britain's Best and Form Journalists and get your first three months free only in September. Go to spectator.co.uk/sale24. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shot to The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Oscar Vincent and I'm joined today by Katie Bowles and Fraser Nelson. Now, there's lots to talk about today, Katie, but the big news over the weekend involves this Labor donor, Lord Ali, who was obviously caught up in cash for access scandal. Now seems to have forked out the thick end of 20k on clothes and glasses for Keir Starmer and his wife. Has he broken any rules here? So we already knew that Keir Starmer had been taking donations from Lord Ali to improve his looks, by which we mean frames of glasses, general outfit, and then what happened over the weekend was the Sunday Times reported that this had also extended to money towards dressing his wife, Lady Victoria Starmer, and now ultimately that could be looked into. Number 10 spokesman said there was an oversight that had been correct after sought advice from the authorities on coming to office. They thought they'd been compliant with the rules, but actually they've resonated to declare these items to Keir Starmer's wife. Now, this all, I think, could seem quite trivial, but of course it is getting a lot of attention, because then you had David Lammy out on the morning round, and I think we can hear a clip of how he defended this. But I also recognise that in our country, there isn't a budget for the Prime Minister's clothes or his wife's clothes. In some countries, there's a substantial budget. I've just come back from America where there is a substantial budget to ensure that the US president and the First Lady, their appearance, can never be challenged. That is not the case in our country, so it is the case that successive leaders of the opposition wanting to represent the country on an international stage, and Prime Ministers have used donors to fund that budget. That is the truth of it. And that has ultimately been the foreign secretary saying the problem is that isn't a budget for the Prime Minister's clothes or his wife's clothes as there are in some countries saying there is a substantial budget, and also the suggestion that they need to look good on behalf of Britain, which of course then led to lots of people saying, "Well, how much can I be paying to look good on behalf of Britain?" Because they've got a few ideas on what I might pick. I think the bigger picture is just there's a slight sense of weariness that Kia Stama seems to be falling into some of these traps when it comes to potential labor sleaze after he had such a big push to attack Boris Johnson for all those things. And yes, in some ways it's the usual suspects coming out in these stories. Some on the left, like Owen Jones, are saying, "How awful for Kia Stama." We know he's not a big fan also on the right of saying, "Hang on a minute, didn't you really push the golden wallpaper story under Boris Johnson?" To me, I think it just suggests that they're falling into some quite obvious mistakes. If you have spent much of your time attacking Boris Johnson on the sense that he didn't have enough money to pay for things, so he had to go for loans when it came to donations when it came for holidays, I don't think giving Lady Victoria Stama a me and M dress to wear when she enters 10 Downing Street or an outfit to wear when she's going on these world summers is equivalent to one of those huge holidays after an election. But you are not getting in a ballpark where these things will be compared. And I think it's actually Kia Stama's past rhetoric, which has been so almost black and white on these things. And now they almost seem surprised or a little bit aggrieved when people ask questions about it. And I think that's what's starting to wear a bit because if you're making mistakes when there's stuff about two months in, what else is going to go wrong? Yeah, Fraser, what do you make of that? Do you think it's fair to equate this to golden wallpaper gate? Not really. I think Kia Stama has been caught out in a fairly standard dilemma for prime ministers and their spouses. And their spouses are photographed. The wardrobe is always assessed and it's quite stressful. You want to look your best for the country and the position that you're in. I mean, perhaps it's unfair that spouses are assessed in this way, but they are. So what do you then do? This has been a dilemma pretty much for everybody married to any world leader here. I mean, in America, for example, the first lady gets her an office, but she doesn't get a clothing budget. She could define the way around herself. Gordon Brown's wife, Sarah Brown, she had this, she pointed out in her memoirs that the prime minister's wives are forever being offered freebies, but people say they can wear it. But they're pretty strict rules governing freebies. You'd have to declare it. And if you're being offered a Louis Vuitton freebie, you'd have to say even if it cost you, I think that it would be worth thousands of pounds. And that's not a good look. So what Sarah Brown did was she would rent it the costume for like, I don't know, 10% of his value or something like that. And that was the way that she managed to come up with trying to look her best while not being seen to be a bit of an email to Marcus. So this is fairly standard. I don't think it's particularly maligned, but what jumps out at me is that it's just a bit amateur. You would have thought that Keir Stormmer would have seen this coming and that people around him would have recognized that this is an absolutely standard trap as with decoration, et cetera. Of course, when Donald Trump was president of America, Melania would wear whatever she wanted. I think she ended up donating clothes to various museums and institutes because she owned them in the first place. They were stupendously wealthy. The Sunaks, when they were in number 11, redecorated the whole place top to toe. It looks absolutely magnificent now as if it were built yesterday. And that is regarded by the Sunak family as a gift to the nation. They're richer than the king. They decided to spend a lot of wealth making it nice and it was a donation. So if you're stupendously wealthy, it's not an issue. But if you aren't stupendously wealthy, then what do you do? I don't think this is excessive. Lady Victoria looks incredibly elegant. She pulls off, well, I don't think she is regarded as an asset to Keir Stormmer. So I feel for her being caught out in this way, but it was inevitable that she was always going to be caught out in this way if they hadn't thought this through. And there was just something about some of the defense over the weekend, which was, well, if you don't have a super rich billionaire PM type figure, obviously, where she said it was called, it's his wife, he was an heir to those amounts, then this is what you might have to do. And I think you're just going to be a bit careful, because if your collective earnings are about 200k per household, you might say you've got working class routes, but I don't think that's necessarily a message that's going to land on sofas all the cost of country saying, oh, of course, I mean, at 200k per household, you know, living in Downey Street, you can't afford your enclose. But obviously, especially given the context of kids time of making tough decisions with a few allowance cuts. Yeah, but certain upper high street. Maybe it's not, maybe it's low designer, but yes. There's another point here. Under the tech system, the Keir Stormmer governs. If your job is to appear in television and your female presenter, you cannot clean your clothes and expenses. Now, that's a bit controversial, because of course- Can you? Can you not? No, I didn't think you could. Okay. I was getting excited that I thought my life had changed. Sorry. Yeah, but it's me and I'm all around. But I do think that's incredibly unfair. I mean, the viewer is sitting there focused on the presenter. And of course, you're going to be looking at what the presenter's wearing is, of course, it's a professional tool. But the tax man ruled in a big case a few years ago that no journalist cannot do this. In other words, the government in the Stormmer elite has declared that there's no such thing as a professional budget for looking good. Even for jobs like that of his wife, like that of presenters, unlike that of anybody else needs to appear on stage in front of cameras that you can't regard your wardrobe as being a work expense. So if that's the rule that he upholds for the rest of the country, of course, is the rule that he ought to uphold in his personal family. Katie elsewhere, Kia Starmer is in Rome, meeting the Italian Prime Minister, Georgie Maloney. They're going to be discussing boat crossings. But it's a timely first engagement for Starmer's new border security commander Martin Hewitt. Who is Martin Hewitt and what's his job? So this appointment has been advertised for some time. Labor's big answer trying to stop the boats is this unit, this border security command. And therefore, I think while it's been a vacancy, Tories and others have been quick to say, well, you don't even have someone who's willing to take what could be a bit of a hospital pass of a job. It was initially, I think, advertised that you could work from any one of ten cities while doing it, some being quite far away from Kent and where some of these issues are closer to home. I think Edinburgh was one option. But for now, the new head is heading to Italy to join Kia Starmer in these talks. In terms of who he is, he is a long-term experienced in the police force, previously served as chair of the National Police Chief's Council. He once got into slight fracas with Sue Alabravoman, suggesting that politicians ought to refrain from calling the police woke, as it is an easy one-liner that will get you a bit of a headline and great on social media, but it's not particularly helpful. He also was quite critical of Boris Johnson's government for, I think, quite confusing lockdown rules in terms of how you police them, but also ministers going out on the airwaves, muddying the message even further in all these press conferences. I think the hope is that he'll be able to use his experience when it comes to busting organised crime and all his networks to then take that to small boats and the criminal gangs, obviously a big part of the people smuggling. Kia Starmer likes using her face to smash the gangs. Can he smash the gangs? It's obviously an incredibly difficult job. I think there will be relief in government that they have just managed to find someone who looks vaguely credible to take it. And one of the things they're going to be discussing, Fraser, is Italy's deal with Albania. Now, Starmer has said that he's open to sending asylum seekers to another country, but is this just Rwanda by another name? No, it's not, because Rwanda would take legally arrived asylum seekers, whether they had a valid case for asylum or not. So it's, I think, by the way, that I think European leaders will have to come up with something like this, and Maloney's been really trying her best to show that she can break the bureaucratic deadlock here. And we've also had one of Germany's immigration advisors recently saying that he would want to maybe pick up some of the empty spaces that Britain isn't going to be using in Rwanda. But all of these guys come up against ECHR and the legal technicalities. Nobody's worked out how you managed to break the legal log jam. And in my opinion, you're going to have to, the whole article, legal architecture is going to have to be redrawn. You're going to get rid of our update. The UN Refugee Convention of 1951, you're going to have to come up with a new sort of Western understanding that we can no longer manage today's demographic pressures on rules that were designed to avoid a repeat of the 1930s. So until that is done, and I think Britain could, I think it could lead the way in this, it might be, I might end up being Germany, because it's in such crisis right now. And it's just closing its borders recently. We've heard that a rather, is inspecting its borders, shall we say, that that takes the lead on that. But I think because of the way the European laws currently constituted, I think it would have to be a wider agreement from all the European leaders. I've been to say, look, we need a legal architecture that allows us to discharge a more obligation to the world's displaced and the world's poor, while keeping our own borders intact and keeps public consent for asylum. Because when you start seeing migrant crime of the level we're seeing in Germany now, that's when public consent starts to be tested and deeply unpleasant political consequences start to arrive. Thank you, Fraser, thank you, Katie, and thank you very much for listening. [Music]