Who does Sir Keir Starmer think he’s kidding with his excuses for use of Lord Alli’s flat? - Jayne Dowle
The Prime Minister is wrong to dismiss the row over using his millionaire friend’s fancy flat as a backdrop for a Covid-era Labour party broadcast and GCSE hideout for his son as “pretty farcical”.
Speaking during a meeting with chief executives on his recent trip to New York, Starmer insisted that “anybody who thinks that I was pretending it was my own home – the idea that I’ve got Union Jacks by my fireplace at home… I think the idea that I was trying to pretend that it was my own home is pretty farcical”.
No mention of the family photograph in the background or the shelves lined with carefully-placed Christmas cards. The video, filmed in a £18m Covent Garden apartment belonging to Starmer’s friend and party donor, Lord Alli, was used in late 2021 to deliver a message on government regulations aimed at limiting the spread of a new strain of Covid-19. It was broadcast on December 13, the day new rules came into effect, with the message that people should work from home where possible.
The irony is not lost; what was the Labour leader doing in someone else’s home whilst telling us to work in our own?
If he really thinks it’s “farcical” then yet again, Starmer is failing to read the room. It’s almost inconceivable that this former lawyer, who has made a virtue out of carefully considering every single decision both professionally and politically, should make such a hash of things every time he opens his mouth.
Downing Street has said that no rules were broken during the filming of the Covid video, but this is immaterial. What has been severed is the rule of trust between the Prime Minister and the public. Making his friend’s apartment look like his own home, to persuade us that he’s speaking from the heart, is duplicitous.
There is no getting away from that. More insidious is the official justification of why Lord Alli’s apartment was used again, between May and July 2024, to shelter Starmer’s teenage son during his GCSE exams.
Aside from some hazy calculations of dates – exams finished in June – Starmer has the audacity to blame the media, citing “journalists outside the front door” of the family home in Kentish Town as reason behind the decampment.
He told Sky TV: “Any parent would have made the same decision.”
Really Sir Keir? As a veteran parent of two rounds of GCSEs, plus a gruelling set of A Levels for my daughter this year, I’d argue that the best place for young people during exams is in the comfort of their own home, whether their dad is running for PM or not.
Does Starmer junior not possess a set of noise-cancelling headphones? After all, most teenagers seem to spend their entire lives zoning out with cans clamped to their ears.
The Starmers’ mortgage-free Kentish Town terraced house, worth an estimated £2m, has a loft conversion, it’s reported. Wouldn’t there be space up there for the lad to hide away with his revision? That’s where I go when I’m working and the chatty man comes to clean my downstairs rugs.
Not quite the same as a crowd of demanding reporters at the front gate, I’ll admit. But still, by making his son into a special case, Starmer has seriously piqued a lot of the people he really should be getting and keeping on side – families for whom the luxury of a friend’s multi-million-pound flat is never, ever going to be remotely available.
It’s also noted that whilst the PM obsessively guards the privacy of his family – he and his wife, Victoria, also have a daughter – it leaves a bad taste when he rolls out his son’s GCSEs as justification for taking advantage of privilege.
This has not gone down well with parents at all, especially those with loud voices – including TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp – facing VAT on private school fees under the Labour government.
Apparently, these critics argue, it’s OK for the PM to take advantage of what amounts to an estimated £20,000-worth of free rent for his child to study in sumptuous comfort, whilst hitting private school parents where it hurts, the wallet.
What is worse however, is the blind hypocrisy of our new Labour Prime Minister. Starmer insisted that his cotton-wool-wrapped offspring needed peace and quiet because GCSEs are your “one chance in life”.
If that’s the case, what fate for all those other children being failed by state education? More or less a third of 16-year-olds leave secondary school without passes in Maths and English. They face the daunting prospect of re-sitting these basic qualifications at FE college, where teaching provision is often less than satisfactory.