The first party conference after winning a historic majority in the UK ought to be an occasion for joy unconfined. Yet, as Labour meets this week in Liverpool, the joy is very much confined. Not only are senior officials obliged to engage in performative optimism to counteract the miserabilism of the past few weeks, they are also having to fend off impertinent questions about who bought their trousers and eyewear.
The first Labour government in 15 years in the UK was supposed to be all about free school meals for deprived children. Instead, it is all about freebies for entitled politicians: “work clothing,” multiple pairs of designer glasses worth ￡2,485 (US$3,312), concert tickets and access to corporate boxes at soccer matches for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer; a personal shopper and designer clothes for his wife, Victoria; more high-end apparel for Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves; clothes and a New York crash pad for British Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner; and for British Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson, Taylor Swift tickets and a lavish 40th birthday party.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking: Labour spent ample time criticizing the Conservative government for partying while Britain was burning. It then embraced “hair-shirt economics” (cutting winter fuel allowances for some pensioners) when it got into power. Starmer has also made much of his record of service as director of public prosecutions. It is as if Cato the Elder decided to turn into Nero.
Illustration: Mountain People
So is the incompetence: Labour must have realized that all these gifts would go public. Starmer must surely understand that receiving them creates obligations. And if he did not realize what everyone who has watched The Godfather knows, his chief of staff, Sue Gray — who previously served as Whitehall’s chief of proprietary and ethics — should have told him. The biggest donor, Waheed Alli, a retail, tech and media entrepreneur, was given a pass to roam around Downing Street at will.
How can we explain such incompetence?
Dysfunction is part of it. Gray is engaged in a turf war with Starmer’s political advisers, particularly Morgan McSweeney, his head of political strategy. The pace of governmental life is another. Ministers are so busy that they can often forget to declare gifts within the requisite time. Then there is the subtle working of power on the human psyche.
A succession of academic studies has demonstrated the truth of Lord Acton’s famous dictum: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
University of California Berkeley social psychologist Dacher Keltner conducted the famous “cookie study,” gathering several groups of three strangers to discuss mundane issues. One from each group was told that they were in charge and served a plate of cookies in the middle of the discussion. That person was more likely to help themselves to a second cookie, eat with his mouth open, and scatter crumbs on his face and the table.
Other research has demonstrated that powerful people are more likely to take risks than less powerful ones, more inclined to cheat at games, more likely to help themselves to candies from jars marked “for children,” take credit for the success of collective enterprises and treat others as means to an end.
Another Berkeley social psychologist, Jennifer Chatman, conducted experiments trying to identify the point at which flattery became ineffective. None was found.
Researchers call this “disinhibition”: Power corrodes the inhibitions most people have about taking a second cookie or accepting a free pair of designer spectacles. Those who seek power are likely to have bigger egos and sharper elbows than regular folk. And then when they get it, they are surrounded by people who burnish those egos for a living.
The speed of Labour’s surrender to these temptations is nevertheless surprising. Most new governments at least begin by pledging to uphold the highest standards. This party is acting more like an addled late-term administration than a shiny new one. There are two possible explanations for the speed of Acton’s poison. One is the paradox of meritocracy. Meritocrats tend to believe that they deserve what they get rather than owing it to birth or chance. Starmer’s people like to emphasize that they went to state schools (unlike the privately educated Tories) and climbed to the top of their professions through hard work rather than connections.
British Secretary of State for Business and Trade Jonathan Reynolds told Sky News that Starmer works “incredibly hard” and therefore deserves a “wider life experience.”
Gray, it appears, felt the same sense of dessert when she negotiated a pay settlement of ￡170,000 a year — ￡3,000 more than the prime minister as a flotilla of headlines blared — while other special advisers received pay cuts.
The second reason is the poison of partisanship. Labour has got so used to treating the Tories as the embodiment of evil and themselves as the embodiments of good that they cannot see their own failings. Everything that is wrong with the UK has to do with Tory greed and Tory incompetence than, say, deep structural problems that transcend the political divide.
And everything Labour does is justified by the fact that it sides with justice.
Right.
“Free Gear Keir,” as he is being nicknamed by tabloid headline writers, stands in a long party tradition of the ends justifying the means: Former British prime minister Harold Wilson, who once pronounced that Labour “is a moral crusade or it is nothing,” accepted numerous gifts from raincoat magnate Joseph Kagan and returned the favors by giving him a knighthood, followed by a peerage. (Kagan was eventually imprisoned.)
Former British prime minister Tony Blair, who promised to be “purer than pure” when he won his 1997 landslide, later accepted a ￡1 million gift to the party from former Formula One Group chief executive officer Bernie Ecclestone.
The party has sworn that it would no longer accept gifts of clothing after days of unforgiving headlines.
However, carefully limiting the self-denial to expensive garments is worrying. So is Rayner’s blase insistence that hospitality and monetary donations “have been a feature of our politics for a very long time.”
The general rule is that the corruption of power is progressive. Senior Labour figures will continue to move in a world of money and bling. And the sense of meritocratic entitlement will continue to burn brightly in the hearts of Starmer and Reeves.
I suspect we will have many future excuses for reflecting on Lord Acton’s wisdom.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and a former writer at The Economist.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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