AMANDA PLATELL: Frocky Horror Picture Show exposes Keir Starmer as a hypocrite
Her first week as the Prime Ministers consort was deemed a stunning sartorial success.
Her first week as the Prime Ministers consort was deemed a stunning sartorial success.
Has Lady Vic got the Holly effect for 50-somethings? my colleague Shane Watson asked on these pages as the dresses she wore sold out almost immediately.
There was the £275 Me+Em midi-dress in bold Labour red for her arrival in Downing Street. The £275 Lantana flower dress from the same high-end high street label in which she was spotted at the races. And then the stunning cream Needle & Thread £450 creation she wore to visit Washington DC with her husband.
So how very ironic that those same clothes are now subject to even greater scrutiny given what emerged at the weekend.
The Starmers have a combined annual income of more than £200,000, rent-free lodgings at No10 (with many of their expenses paid for by we taxpayers) and Sir Keirs personal net worth is estimated at £3million.
The Starmers have a combined annual income of more than £200,000, rent-free lodgings at No10. (Keir and Lady Victoria Starmer arriving for Keir Starmers keynote speech at the Labour Conference)
First Lady in red: She chose this £275 Me+Em dress to announce the Starmers arrival in No 10
Day at the races: Lady Starmer in a £275 Lantana flower dress by Me+Em at Sandown Park in July
Jet Setter: The Prime Ministers wife landed in Washington DC wearing a £450 creation by Needle & Thread
Yet the man who vowed hed clean up politics and root out cronyism failed to declare that Lady Vic, a former lawyer who now works in NHS occupational health, had received clothes paid for by the PMs own biggest personal donor, the controversial multi-millionaire Lord Alli.
Of course, we dont know exactly which dresses the Labour peer paid for, only that he covered the costs of a personal shopper, clothes and alterations while embroiled in a cash for access scandal after it was revealed he had been given a No10 security pass despite having no role in government.
This has a nasty stink to it. Starmer might style himself as a man of the working people, striving to make the world a fairer place.
But this saga shows that while he denies millions of pensioners their winter fuel allowances, he and his wife are benefiting from such questionable largesse.
Why did this undeniably well-off couple not dip into their own bank accounts to cover the cost of clothes, styling advice and, of course, the designer spectacles for Sir Keir as previously revealed in the passes for glasses scandal?
I have worked in this turbulent political world as press secretary to the then-leader of the Opposition William Hague. Ive been witness to such shenanigans and it is not OK.
And its perplexing to me that Victoria Starmer even accepted Lord Allis lavish gifts in the first place when shes made it very clear in her rare interviews that she isnt interested in being a plus-one political spouse.
One party insider told a newspaper that she is quite sassy in that shes quite unbothered by what [her husbands] doing.
Given that, so far at least, shes the least visible partner of any incumbent prime minister in living memory, why does she need her wardrobe paid for by cronies?
Whatever lies behind his Frocky Horror Picture Show moment, the cold hard truth is that Keir Starmer has been exposed as a breathtaking hypocrite and fraud.
