BY STEWART SLATER

Most governments end mired in sleaze and ridicule but most have the decency to wait until their second or third terms before doing so. It is the current administration’s great achievement that it has got there within a couple of months. For “Passgate” has morphed into “Clothesgate”, internet wags have christened the Prime Ministerial consort ”Lady Victoria Sponger” and even the Guardian has got in on the act, pointing out that the Unloved Leader has taken over £100,000 in freebies, more than any other leading politician.

The optics are, to put it mildly, not good. You do not need designer specs to see that. To the extent the government has done anything since coming to power which has cut through to the public, it is removing the Winter Fuel Allowance from pensioners which has led to daily, dire prognostications of a cull of the elderly when the temperature drops. Spending twenty grand on clothes when granny is facing the prospect of freezing appears a little tone deaf. Spending twenty grand on clothes at any time (someone on the average wage has, at the time of writing, about another month to work until they will have taken home that figure this calendar year) slightly cuts against the “we’re all in it together” narrative the government is so keen to spread.

Of contrition, there has so far been little sign. Keir the Disliked has signalled his intention to continue taking free tickets to Arsenal matches (security demands it apparently which would be news to Rishi Sunak, always happy to be pictured on the terraces), while Lady Sponger, in a move even Marie Antoinette might have deemed unwise, chose to spend the day after the revelation of her own spending flaunting herself in borrowed designer clothes at London Fashion Week, her over-sized shades giving every impression of the cat that got the cream.

The First Scrounger of the Treasury appears to have no conception that he might have done something wrong, save in the procedural sense of the timing of his declarations – he is, after all, a lawyer. He never gives the impression of considering that he might have done something wrong. He is, he appears to have decided, a good person therefore, his actions must be good. It is fine when he does it because it is he who is doing it. Boris Johnson was a wrong’un so his taking money from shady millionaires was to be condemned, he is a good person, so his clothing allowance from his sugar daddy is to be praised.

His towering and comically misconceived moral self-regard may explain his reaction to the story, but they do not explain why it happened. What led a 61 year-old multi-millionaire to conclude that it was reasonable for another man to buy his clothes? Why did he not just put his hand in his own pocket? The answer, I suspect, lies with one of his predecessors.

There was, you may remember, a to-do over David Cameron’s involvement with Greensill Capital and much discussion over why he had chosen to join the business in the first place. Perhaps it was boredom. Perhaps, after a very public loss with Brexit, he was hunting for a quick win to salve his ego. Or perhaps, some suggested, it was to do with his social position. For while power could mask this, his loss of office had revealed that he was substantially poorer than his friends from school and university. He had spent his productive years climbing the greasy pole, they making millions in the City and at the Bar. It was not that he was poor compared to the average Joe, but he was poor compared to the average Rupert with whom he spent weekends in the Cotswolds. With the unpleasantness of Europe blowing a large hole in his future earnings on the speaker circuit, he needed to do something to fund the lifestyle to which he was exposed and which he believed he deserved.

Starmer is in a similar position. His earnings as DPP, Opposition Leader and now PM mean that there is no reasonable way to call him poor. But he is substantially poorer than he would have been had he stayed at the Bar. And he is substantially poorer than his friends who did. Like Cameron, he suffers from absolute affluence and relative poverty. And, like Cameron, he has acted in such a way as to keep up with the Joneses, acquiring the clothes and spectacles of a handsomely remunerated silk and hobnobbing with similarly high-status football fans in corporate boxes.

For we are a tribal species, judging our position by those close to us and believing that we deserve what they have – search your emotions when your neighbour drives up in a new car, or tells you about their holiday. Starmer, like Cameron, is in a position where, had he made different choices, he would have a different financial status and has sought to acquire the trappings of it. Doubtless believing that his presence in national life is a public good (others may disagree – the possible universe in which he stayed at the Bar seems oddly attractive compared to the actual universe), he probably regards compensation for the financial hit it has entailed as entirely just.

Lord Alli, then, is merely a convenient way of squaring the circle, allowing him to have what he wants without the struggle (greater than it might otherwise have been) of paying for it. He serves as an income multiplier. But before we start constructing the gallows, is this really that unusual?

For a large swathe of the country behaves in the same way. The public sector functions as the national Lord Alli, allowing most of those who use it to multiply the value of their earnings. Think of the parent who turns up at the local state school in a swanky car – paying school fees might reduce him to a rusty banger. Or the gossip boasting about her holiday in the GP’s surgery – if she were forced to pay for her own care, her three weeks in Bali might have been three nights in Bognor. The average Briton makes a lifetime profit out of the British state or, to put it another way, leads a lifestyle which would be impossible without the generous support of HMG. And, like Sir Keir, the average Briton believes it is perfectly fine for others to fund their next dash around the hamster wheel of social status, helping them to avoid envying others and provoke others into envying them.

It is easy and fun to condemn His Majesty’s First Sponger as a hypocrite. He is every bit as pro having cake and pro eating it as the predecessor he so roundly condemned. It is easy and fun to condemn his dress sense (the twenty grand does not, to my eye, appear to have been well spent). But before we go in studs up on his taking gifts which he could certainly have bought himself, perhaps we should ask who funds us?

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.