Digging Your Own Political Grave

Keir Starmer, the man who once built his brand on being as interesting as a clip from Gardeners’ World, has now entered the thrilling chapter of Some Drama Starmer. After years of projecting the image of calm managerialism, he’s finally caught the eye by embracing the classic politician’s habit of turning molehills into mountains—while furiously digging the trench around them with a designer spade. Indeed, we’ve reached the point in Starmer’s premiership where his supposedly rock-solid principles have collided with the allure of luxury freebies, personal infighting, and the delicious contradictions of a man professing socialist ideals while pocketing posh football seats and wearing eyewear so expensive you’d need binoculars just to see the price tag.

Let's start with those luxuries. While the average MP scrapes by on a mere £86,000 a year, Keir and his wife are pulling in a cool £210,000 between them. Yet, despite this cushy combined income, Starmer has somehow become Parliament’s unofficial brand ambassador for designer clothes, luxury glasses, and – naturally – complimentary Premier League hospitality. Because nothing screams "man of the people" like turning up to work in a new set of £2,485 specs. Or, as the spin doctors probably called it, “luxury eyewear.” One suspects that if you need £2.5k worth of spectacles, you're not struggling to see the truth so much as deliberately squinting to avoid it.

This begs the question: where, exactly, are Starmer’s much-touted socialist principles in all this? Last time I checked, socialism was more about redistributing wealth than redistributing freebies. Starmer may be pitching himself as the leader of the working class, but with his penchant for “luxury” eyewear and gifts, it’s increasingly difficult to picture him doing anything without wondering if he’s scrounged the clothes off a donor. What would real Labour leaders of yesteryear say?

For a moment, let’s imagine what Michael Foot – Labour’s famously frugal, donkey-jacket-wearing leader – would make of all this. Foot was a man who lived his principles. A firebrand socialist through and through, Foot was mocked for dressing like someone’s geography teacher, but at least his wardrobe choices were his own. If anyone had offered him £4,000 football tickets or designer glasses, he’d probably have written them a pamphlet on the immorality of it. Starmer, meanwhile, is just a designer frame away from resembling a preening CEO whose idea of socialism is checking whether the company's HR policy includes free lunch.

And let’s not even get started on Starmer’s theatrics around football. His heartfelt declaration that he’s “never going to an Arsenal game again because I can’t accept hospitality” reads like the sort of thing you’d expect from a Hamlet soliloquy. Is he really so selfless, or is this just a way of publicly moping because he won’t get to watch the Gunners from the comfort of a private box again? Surely the real scandal is that Starmer even felt this entitled in the first place. What’s next? A human rights tribunal to argue that accepting £4,000 worth of Taylor Swift tickets from the Premier League is a basic human right? These are the dilemmas of the modern socialist leader, apparently.

And then there’s the ongoing civil war among his team. Starmer’s Some Drama era isn't just about his love of freebies – it’s also about the truly magnificent mess of staff infighting that’s now spilling out into public view. His chief of staff, who conveniently earns more than him, is locked in a battle with underlings who aren’t quite as lucky in their salary negotiations, and the whole team seems more focused on pay scales than policies. Call it The Hunger Games: Spad Edition, where the real prize is a pay bump and the losers can spend their time leaking to the press.

You can almost hear the laughter ringing through Tory HQ. After all, when your party’s main selling point is that you’re better than the Conservatives, watching them implode over staff salaries and football tickets is a gift that just keeps on giving. There’s something wonderfully ironic about Starmer, the clean-cut, “steady hand” leader, wading knee-deep into the same swamp of entitlement that he once vowed to drain. Turns out, the path to 10 Downing Street is paved with a few well-timed gigs and some top-shelf football matches.

Which brings us back to the broader question of why Starmer is doing this. Is it really the case that in modern politics, even the leader of the Labour Party feels the need to show off his luxury taste? We’ve gone from Michael Foot’s rumpled jacket to Starmer’s designer wardrobe, and somewhere along the way, the principles have been thrown out with the proletarian bathwater. Instead of showing solidarity with the working class, Starmer seems to be showing solidarity with the upper echelons of London’s social scene. After all, if you’re going to talk about “leveling up,” it helps to have a vantage point from a cushy executive box at Arsenal.

But these excesses aren’t just a minor slip-up. They expose the gap between Starmer’s carefully crafted image and the reality of his behaviour. This is a man whose political career was built on being the safe, sensible alternative to the flashy Tory millionaires. Yet here he is, accepting gifts that the average voter wouldn’t even dream of. It’s hard to take Starmer seriously when he’s railing against inequality one minute and attending Coldplay concerts on someone else’s tab the next. (And at £698 for a couple of Coldplay tickets, the real scandal is how much of that was spent trying to stay awake.)

More than anything, though, this episode highlights the inevitable trajectory of every politician who rises to the top. Starmer has officially entered the stage of Some Drama, and we all know where it leads next: All Drama. It happens to the best of them – Blair, Brown, and of course, Liz Truss (though in her case, it was more like All Drama on fast-forward). Politicians start out promising the world and end up defending their right to private jets and box seats. What was once a minor indulgence becomes a lifestyle, and before you know it, they're more concerned with defending their perks than fixing the country.

So, what are we to make of Keir Starmer, the man who campaigned as No Drama, and now finds himself embroiled in freebie controversies, football melodrama, and internal warfare? At this rate, it won’t be long before he’s reaching for that designer spade to dig himself deeper into the political quagmire. He may not be Loves the Drama Starmer just yet, but he’s on his way. And for a leader who once prided himself on his principles, it’s a sad, if inevitable, twist.

Perhaps someone ought to gift him that designer spade. He’ll be needing it if he plans to keep digging.