The uncomfortable truth about ‘freebie-gate’ Political hypocrisy is an inevitability

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.

Media has a responsibility to hold political figures to standards of transparency. But it is difficult to see how the current lines of questioning do anything but make Britain seem a parochial backwater whose media class is wilfully out of touch with the exigencies of political office. An American politician of Keir Starmer’s rank, for example, who refused the trappings of stylists and security would not be viewed as an honest broker but, at best, an eccentric.

Outrage over the perks of political power plays into a perennial theme — one especially indulged during conference season — that politicians should be just like ordinary people. Politicians themselves are guiltier than anyone for encouraging belief in this strained fiction: Keir Starmer’s awkward reminiscences about his tool-making father and Rachel Reeves’s foghorn reminders that she went to comprehensive school being just two claims to trenchant normality this government has been trying to condition the public into never forgetting. It’s a depressingly anti-elitist line which creates the expectation that front-line politicians should enjoy no special status or resources, even when representing their country in the eyes of the world.

Though some will find it controversial to say so, it is tempting to think that public practices of accountability lead most people to seriously overestimate the moral significance of hypocritical behaviour in public life. As a matter of ethical theory, the second-order question of whether one has flouted one’s own principles is arguably much less important than the primary question of whether one has transgressed any further principle of importance in doing so.

At the institutional level, however, hypocrisy is a feature, rather than a bug, of our parliamentary system, with the Opposition operating under a standing incentive to hold the Government to a standard of behaviour higher than that it might instinctively apply to itself. Of course, once in office, the gulf between stated aspiration and the necessities of political reality grow starker still. A front-line politician who resolutely refused the option of hypocrisy under such circumstances would have a short career.

As Keir Starmer and his colleagues are currently finding out, accusations of hypocrisy are particularly popular with the media not because they are overwhelmingly important, but because they are so easy to prosecute. All it takes is a saunter down the archives to find an incriminating phrase or action. A simple contradiction is enough. Basically, they’re looking for a contradiction. This is far easier to land than arguing from first principles that a position they occupy, while not strictly inconsistent, is nonetheless mistaken.

Easily lost in all this is the idea that a certain measure of public hypocrisy is likely a constitutive feature of political life in the kind of well-functioning, open democracies one should wish to live in. Somewhat inevitably, these also tend to be countries in which there is inbuilt pressure on leading media figures to whip themselves up into a fervour over moralised criticisms that on reflection they would find hard to take at all seriously. After all, as we all know, if anyone loves a freebie more than a politician, it’s a journalist.

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John Maier is an UnHerd columnist and PhD student at the University of Oxford

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