PM should have gone to Specsavers

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer - sponsored spectacles? Picture: Justin Tallis/PA Wire

After the 1997 election wipeout, as Scottish Conservatives contemplated the next four or five years with no MPs for the first time, I recruited the unseated Edinburgh South MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind as a new Evening News columnist.

We invited him to North Bridge for lunch with the senior editorial team, and he remarked at how the Conservatives had never done anything nearly as bad as the new Labour government’s essentially corrupt decision to exempt Formula One motor racing from the tobacco advertising ban. This was after intensive lobbying from F1 chiefs Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley, and only months after Ecclestone had donated £1 million to the party.

Admittedly, it dwarfs the row over Sir Keir Starmer’s failure to declare that his wife’s expensive wardrobe was funded by his biggest personal donor, Lord Alli, the ex-chair of online fashion retailer Asos. But after all the outrage about Partygate and Boris Johnson’s fancy wallpaper, at the very least it shows a remarkable lack of attention to detail for the man who was one of Britain’s leading lawyers.

However, the PM did declare almost £19,000 worth of clothes and glasses he’d received from Lord Alli, so maybe he didn’t think the rules covered his missus. Bit of a blunder for a King’s Counsel, never mind the Prime Minister. How many pensioners about to lose their winter fuel allowance can ask a wealthy friend to drop into Specsavers to buy them a new pair of Gregories? The pigs, as George Orwell wrote, walk on two legs.

PM should have gone to Specsavers - John McLellan