Keir Starmer says he will pay back £6,000 worth of gifts and hospitality

Sir Keir Starmer has paid back more than £6,000 he received in gifts and hospitality as the furore surrounding Labour freebies and donations trudges on.

The prime minister vowed to overhaul the rules on what ministers are allowed to accept in the wake of the first major scandal to rock his administration.

He has previously said he will not accept any more free clothing after a row over his decision to accept £32,000 of workwear, multiple pairs of glasses worth £2,400 and use of a £18 million penthouse from the Labour donor and peer Waheed Alli.

Speaking in Brussels during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, Starmer said he was making the repayments in relation to hospitality until new rules on hospitality were put in place.

It is believed that tickets to see Taylor Swift and rented clothing for his wife are among the items he will pay back.

“We came in as a government of change,” he said. “We are now going to bring forward principles for donations, because, until now, politicians have used their best individual judgment on a case-by-case basis. I think we need some principles of general application. So, I took the position that until the principles are in place it was right for me to make those repayments.”

Downing Street sources said he was not setting a precedent that no ministers should ever be able to accept hospitality in future, but that paying back the sums was the right thing to do while the rules were drawn up.

The full list of gifts now paid for by Starmer include:

Four Taylor Swift tickets from Universal Music Group totalling £2,800
Two Taylor Swift tickets from the Football Association at a cost of £598
Four tickets to Doncaster Races from Arena Racing Corporation at £1,939.
An £839 clothing rental agreement with Edeline Lee, the designer recently worn by Victoria Starmer to London fashion week, along with one hour of hair and makeup.

However, he is not returning tickets to a football match in September donated by Tottenham Hotspur with a value of £920, or another in August from Arsenal at a value of £1,000, having previously said that he needs to be in a box rather than the stands for security reasons.

Taking to social media, the Fleet Street Fox pointed out that Boris Johnson had more than £1 million in gifts, two free houses and still needed a wealthy causing to underwrite £800k of ‘personal expenditure’.

So, context…

Jack Peat

Jack is a business and economics journalist and the founder of The London Economic (TLE). He has contributed articles to VICE, Huffington Post and Independent and is a published author. Jack read History at the University of Wales, Bangor and has a Masters in Journalism from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.