There is an old joke
from the Soviet era about Brezhnev showing his mother around his world. He
showed her his enormous office and his luxury Kremlin flat, and then took her
by chauffeur-driven limousine to see his country house on the outskirts of
Moscow before showing her pictures of his dacha on the Black Sea coast. When he
finished, his mother said, “It’s all very well, Leonid – but what happens if
the communists ever get back into power?”. It’s not only dictators and
would-be dictators who can be swayed by the trappings of office; it can happen
even in so-called democracies like the UK.
Boris Johnson was,
of course, famous for the extent of his freeloading on ‘friends’. From holidays
to weddings, from
wallpaper
and furnishings to somewhere
to live: all were fair game for a man rarely known to pay for anything very
much himself. It’s an attitude not limited to Tories, however; Keir Starmer also
seems quite happy to enjoy the benefits of the job as well as accepting a range
of gifts and freebies from friends and supporters, as Owen Jones discussed
in the Guardian last week. It’s not on the same scale as Johnson, nor does
Starmer seem to suffer from the same degree of casual indifference to properly
and accurately declaring things. There is no suggestion that any rules have
been broken, to use the much-loved response of politicians caught doing
something which might look a little bit dodgy to some people. But that merely
outsources the issue to those drawing up the rules.
It does raise some
questions of judgement. Why does someone being paid £128,000 a year need
someone else to buy him £16,000 worth of ‘work clothing’? (Even more pertinent
to many of us, how would one even set about spending that much on clothes for
the office anyway?) And whilst there’s no suggestion of corruption – no hint of
any direct quid pro quo – why would someone even want to buy shirts for such a
well-paid friend? There is a somewhat shadowy area between a corrupt
relationship and a wholly professional one, and expensive gifting falls right
into it.
It’s the same issue
which led to the downfall of Vaughan Gething here in Wales. It isn’t about being
corrupt, it isn’t about doing favours for the donor, and it isn’t about
breaking any rules. It is about the potential perception that someone who gives
expensive gifts to someone in, or with the potential to be in, a position of
power might just have some sort of unvoiced expectation associated with it. It’s
about whether someone on a high salary who doesn’t even have to fund his own
clothing out of it might have at least a little difficulty in understanding how
much difference a loss of £300 in income might make to a pensioner on a low income.
Above all it’s about why someone in that position can’t even understand why
anyone might ask questions about such gifts. Judgement is about more than
following the rules.
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