‘Say yes to the dress,” is a cheerful catch-cry for reality TV makeover shows – but no one imagined it would become a career-holing reef for politicians.
Trouble is, it’s not just the lure of posh clothes that has put the UK’s new Labour government in the dogbox with voters. Behind a billionaire’s donation of costly outfits to these avowedly socialist politicians is a more consequential political risk than vanity: the donation of policy advice.
So far, not all funding sources for the more than two dozen private advisers to Labour’s shadow cabinet before the election have been disclosed. A Labour-aligned think tank that attracts donations financed many of them.
Advisers are now also being loaned to ministers, including Chancellor Rachel Reeves. This isn’t necessarily sinister, but it dwarfs the daily revelations of free couture, concert tickets and other baubles in raising potentials for conflict of interest.
Politicians naturally hire and consult like-minded advisers. But if a business or individual is paying for them, queasy doubts ensue.
Loaned aides may be within the rules, provided details are declared. But in the current patchwork of confirmed and suspected donations, the polls suggest the public is shocked that this government should be just as insouciant as the Conservatives about accepting freebies from potentially influential private interests.
As perks go, a free suit or vanity photo are pretty much self-negating. Once people know the outfit was a freebie and the pic was contrived, all glamour and mystique evaporate. With donated advisers, however, the key question is practically unanswerable: in whose interests are the donated advisers advising?
Donors may simply be improving the quality of advice by paying for people whose talents the party or cabinet can’t afford. But it’s hard to disprove the counterfactual – that donors expect certain decisions or even favours to flow from that advice.
Clouding the picture is the sheer admirability of the most conspicuous donor, Lord Waheed Alli. At press time, there was no suggestion he’d directly funded advisers, but he has proudly given clothes, accessories, accommodation and other donations to the party and its grandees over many years, totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds.
A child of modestly incomed immigrants, he created a groundbreaking television empire with hit shows including The Big Breakfast. He became the first openly gay peer at 35, and has deep personal friendships with a number of Labour figures. It would be more newsworthy had he not donated handsomely to the party.
It’s unclear what, if anything, he or his business interests could gain from Labour being in power as distinct from the Conservatives.
But at a time of faltering growth, and with the government axing winter energy subsidies for most pensioners and refusing to lift the two-child threshold on the child benefit allowance, posh frocks for free is an incitement.
An especially surprising trougher is Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, so ostentatious in her working-class cred that she has admitted deliberately using bad grammar and vowed she would “never snog a Tory”. She has employed an image consultant/vanity photographer and has accepted free luxury accommodation and clothes.
Though the previous government accepted considerably more from wealthy donors, the public seems less bothered about Tories getting big business handouts. It helped that former leader Rishi Sunak was so wealthy as to be immune to perks, and Boris Johnson had been cheerfully unabashed about being on the scrounge his whole career.
Alas, no one told Theresa May, who famously declared in 2017, “There is no magic money tree.” There are plenty, but they’re only deciduous in the vicinity of politicians apt to supply the right policy propagation.
