If politics is showbusiness for the ugly, then party conference season is their Oscars. It was tempting to stand on the side-lines of the carpeted entrance of Liverpool’s convention centre and shout “Who are you wearing?” as successive cabinet ministers swept by.
By the media’s assessment, many this year will have been cloaked in political hypocrisy, the past week having only provided more data for the robust rule of thumb that with the Tories the problem is always sex, and with Labour always money.
It is hard to escape the feeling, though, that “freebie-gate” has so far been sustained by the motley quantity, rather than the quality, of the evidence it relies on. The long-standing generosity of Lord Alli has combined loosely in the public imagination with the outputs of an undignified briefing war within No 10 to create the feeling that Labour ministers aren’t holding themselves to the standards of sober probity they so righteously affirmed in opposition.
While any one accusation could be litigated, perhaps successfully, on its merits, the slow accretion of new stories, in the manner of a pointillist image, creates a hazy, hard to dispel, impression of malaise. Not noticing this, or perhaps not knowing what to do about it, a number of ministers pursued oddly unpromising lines of personalised defence while under pressure in Liverpool’s media zone.
Among the most grimly plausible of the responses, Bridget Phillipson suggested that her 40th birthday party (funded by part of a £14,000 donation) had actually seemed to her to be very much celebrated in a “work context”; then, in an impressively cut-throat piece of buck-passing she blamed her own child for her accepting free tickets to a Taylor Swift concert. Not to be outdone on brazen front, Angela Rayner suggested that her declared reliance on Lord Alli’s largesse while visiting New York was in fact evidence of “over transparent” behaviour.
Whatever schadenfreude this might afford to those watching such contorted responses delivered half-heartedly to camera, it is probably worth recognising how overblown the litany of accusations has become. Perhaps Keir Starmer does have questions to answer about the historical, and possibly undeclared, use he made of Lord Alli’s London address. But the following is much more doubtful: that it is in principle scandalous that the prime minister wears clothes he hasn’t picked and paid for himself, that security requires he use a director’s box at football stadiums, and that his school-aged children escape the pre-election media buzz around their family home while taking exams.
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SubscribeNicely put. We all love having someone to blame! But it distracts from actually finding solutions to the countries problems.
On the other hand, does hypervigilance over relatively small hypocrisies guard against corruptions of the scale that can actually affect national economies?
Starmer is a hypocritical pig trougher who failed to encourage interethnic cooperation during his conference speech despite the riots being fuelled by grooming violence, street level sexual harassment and violent murder in their communities.
Instead all he promoted was interethnic competition with his failure to call out the sources of interethnic tensions with his two tier approach.
In his two tier way, he thinks he is a deserving pig trougher when a majority of the demos does not think he is a deserving pig trougher.
His actual hypocrite is on the basis of principles now that it is very apparent he hasn’t got any. Is that what you meant by primary.
An unprincipled man who is currently shielded by the State and one who has control over £1trillion in state money.
Worse still, his hypocrisy is being justified by his self righteous belief in himself due to protecting ethnic minorities all his life so he can’t even see that he is two tier along with all the interethnic competition. That makes him a dangerous man especially in terms of national interethnic unity.
So what’s his label for violent interethnic groomers and violent interethnic murderers and what’s his label for himself?