Kishwar Desai| Labour MP quits, calls PM hypocrite; Oxford Street to be free of traffic?
There are very few British Prime Ministers who have come out unscathed from the daily grilling that goes on in the British press.
And this time it raises a question that has vexed many over the centuries: “Do clothes maketh the man”? Or woman, as the case may be. And should a Prime Minister and his wife be always well dressed? If the answer is “yes”, then what can be wrong if someone offers to buy fancy clothes for you? Surely if you are the Prime Minister, you should have better things to worry about than what you will wear for the Cabinet meeting or the UN get-together… And then, the Prime Minister’s wife is always under scrutiny over what she wears. In fact, the press even publishes the brand she is wearing along with the price tag. (I have always wondered about how quickly the media know it all — but then undoubtedly the dress designers also have a PR firm which will quickly leak the information to the press.)
But Sir Keir Starmer made the mistake of allowing clothes worth thousands of pounds to be gifted to him by a supporter — and the subsequent hammering by the right-wing press means that he (despite having won a handsome victory) is now very, very unpopular —and 26 per cent voters dislike him more than those who like him.
The alleged error is that Sir Keir was given clothes to wear worth thousands of pounds plus spectacles costing more than two thousand pounds by a rich member of the Labour Party, Lord Ali.
MPs are supposed to declare gifts received but some of this happened during election when Parliament was not meeting and Sir Keir was a candidate but not an elected MP yet. However, the gifts are worth a six-figure sum. His statement about them got delayed, and that has become the latest scandal.
And then it turned out that fashion conscious Lord Ali had also helped Lady Starmer to buy thousands pounds worth of dresses as well as the Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the Deputy Leader Angela Rayner.
*
And to make matters worse, Sir Keir “borrowed “Lord Alli’s apartment to film a documentary and then it seems his son used it to study for his GCSEs. None of this is actually a crime, especially when obviously Sir Keir and his wife were badly advised about all these posh togs to swan around in, and a swanky apartment to get filmed in. For most, of us it would be a relief to have someone who said — “don’t worry, old chap, just tell me your sizes and I will get you nicely turned out. And whenever you need — my home is your castle.”
But sometimes generous friends can be your undoing… Lady Starmer should just make a bonfire of the vanities and auction the clothes to give the money to charity. It might calm everyone down.
*
And now even more embarrassingly for the PM it has led to the resignation of one Labour MP — Rosie Duffield, who will now sit as an independent as she is embarrassed over how Sir Keir and his wife and indeed other members of his Cabinet have also accepted freebies from Lord Alli and others, apart from some other political decisions she does not agree with. She is the first to go, but the fact that she has been extremely vocal and called the PM hypocritical does not augur well at all…
*
Meanwhile apart from the political theatre playing out, London continues to thrive with superb theatre at the West End. Currently we have the celebrated Samuel Becket classic Waiting for Godot getting rave reviews. At the National Theatre there is Shakespeare’s rarely performed Coriolanus. And there is a musical based on a 1957 Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd. I am booking tickets like there is no tomorrow.
*
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, re-elected once more, is planning to redesign Oxford Street as a traffic free zone. Of course, it is the heart of London’s shopping area where you have Selfridges and Marks and Spencer and John Lewis. But there are buses and taxis and cars which he thinks create unwanted congestion. But making the most frequently visited stretch of Oxford Street traffic-free raises the worry that we may have to walk long distances carrying our shopping bags… hmmmm… one more reason to shop online!
*
And… here we go again! It seems that soup has once more been thrown by climate activists at the “Sunflowers” painted by Vincent Van Gogh, at an exhibition at the National Gallery. What has astonished me is that those indulging in this vandalism are not young! Among the three who were arrested, is a sixty-year-old man and a seventy-seven-year-old woman. Anger knows no age!