02 October 2024 , 19:48
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The Prime Minister is covering the cost of Taylor Swift tickets and a designer clothing rental agreement following a donations controversy.
Keir Starmer has paid back more than £6,000 worth of gifts and hospitality, including Taylor Swift tickets and rented clothing for his wife, after a row over his acceptance of freebies.
The prime minister handed back some tickets and gifts he had received since he entered No 10 in July as he vowed to overhaul the rules on what ministers are allowed to accept.
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 £18m penthouse from the Labour donor and peer Waheed Alli.
However, his attempt to draw a decisive line under the row suffered a setback on Wednesday as the Lords standards watchdog launched an investigation into Alli over whether he had correctly declared his financial interests.
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.
“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.
Gifts now paid for by Starmer include four Taylor Swift tickets from Universal Music Group totalling £2,800, and two Taylor Swift tickets from the Football Association at a cost of £598. He also returned the cost of 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, was also covered by the prime minister.
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.
Starmer’s decision to return the cost of the hospitality comes after weeks of criticism of the prime minister for accepting more than £100,000 in hospitality and free gifts.
This includes clothing worth £32,000 and multiple pairs of glasses worth about £2,400 from Alli, as well as the use of an £18m central London penthouse during the election campaign.
The latest MPs’ register of interests, published on Wednesday, also showed that Starmer accepted £6,134 from Alli for clothing for his wife in June, while Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, declared £836 in hospitality at a DJ booth in Ibiza from Ayita LLC. The register also shows that Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, became a landlord of a property in London jointly with her partner after they moved into Downing Street.
Like Starmer, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, declared five tickets with the use of a hospitality box to see a Tottenham Hotspur v Arsenal football match in September, with a value of £2,300.
The new register also gave further details of huge donations to the Conservative leadership candidates. The frontrunner among MPs, Robert Jenrick, has received just over £250,000 in total donations, ahead of Tom Tugendhat on almost £225,000, Kemi Badenoch on £200,000 and James Cleverly on £180,000.
While in New York last week, Starmer defended borrowing an £18m penthouse flat from Alli during the election, saying he took the offer so that his son would have a place to study for his GCSEs without having to walk past journalists and protesters outside their family home.
The prime minister would not be drawn on Wednesday on the investigation into Alli, which is understood to relate to a clerical registration of an interest and not donations to politicians.
This was listed on the Lords standards commissioners’ website on Wednesday as being subject to an inquiry. “The fact that an investigation is taking place does not mean that the rules have been broken,” the notice said.
A Labour spokesperson said: “Lord Alli will cooperate fully with the Lords commissioner and he is confident all interests have been registered. We cannot comment further while this is ongoing.”
Alli’s business interests have been under scrutiny since Open Democracy reported last week that the peer had added his directorship at Mac (BVI) Limited, a firm based in the British Virgin Islands, to his register of interests only after the news outlet contacted him last month to ask why it was missing.
It found he had not declared that he had been a director of Mac (BVI) Limited since April 2023.
When questioned about it, Alli told Open Democracy the omission was an “unintentional error”, adding: “I hadn’t realised until you asked that it wasn’t listed on my register of interests.”
He then added the directorship to his register as a “non-financial interest”.
Financial accounts show Alli holds “incentive shares” in the firm, so if an acquisition is completed while he is a director, he will receive “a one-off transaction fee of an amount equal to £25,000 per calendar month elapsed between the date of his appointment and a platform acquisition being completed”.
For the Conservatives, the new register showed that Jenrick has received another £25,000 from a firm that was lent money via a tax haven, taking its total donations to him up to £100,000. Earlier this week, Phillip Ullmann, an entrepreneur, revealed he had given the money to Jenrick through Spott Fitness, a fitness coaching app provider.
The company’s accounts show it has no employees, has never made a profit and has more than £300,000 of debts, and in January it registered a loan from Centrovalli, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. Ullmann’s name does not appear on the list of people with significant control in the company. Jenrick has said that all his donations are “perfectly legal and valid”.
The new register showed a £20,000 donation to Tugendhat from a company called Blue WV Ltd, which had already given him £44,500. Registered to an address on a housing estate in Peckham, south-east London, the company was formed less than a year ago and so has filed no accounts.
Its work is described as “activities of professional membership organisations”, and it has one director, Guy Miscampbell, a former government adviser who now works for a polling company. Tugendhat’s campaign was contacted for comment.