Your support helps us to tell the story
A minister has claimed accepting freebies while in opposition is “different” from doing so in government as she attempted to explain why Sir Keir Starmer has paid back the value of some Taylor Swift tickets, but not thousands of pounds’ worth of other gifts.
Industry minister Sarah Jones suggested Sir Keir and other Labour frontbenchers took free tickets to concerts and festivals while in opposition to “build relationships” with businesses.
It included Sir Keir’s £2,800 trip to see Taylor Swift and Glastonbury tickets worth more than £3,000 accepted from Google by business secretary Jonathan Reynolds.
But Ms Jones said: “There is a difference between government and opposition when you’re building relationships in opposition, it’s different when you’re a government minister with real levers of power.”
Ms Jones was sent out to defend Sir Keir’s decision to pay back more than £6,000 worth of gifts and hospitality. The move, which followed weeks of criticism of Labour ministers over freebies, was made as an updated register of MPs’ interests revealed thousands of pounds of additional freebies accepted by Sir Keir’s top team.
The latest update showed Angela Rayner’s trip to an Ibiza nightclub, where she was filmed dancing in the DJ booth, was an £836 handout from the agent of the electronic DJ Fisher.
Sir Keir’s decision to pay back some gifts but not others has raised more questions than it has answered, and has piled pressure on other Labour ministers to hand back the value of their own freebies.
Ms Jones said she will look at paying back the value of some of the free hospitality she accepted, including tickets to the Capital Radio Summertime Ball. While she stressed that “it was all completely above board”, she said she would not go to other free events if she is invited in future.
She told Times Radio: “There is a difference in what you do as a minister, and what you do as a shadow minister.” She said nobody else is being asked to pay back gifts because “nobody has broken the rules”.
Gifts paid back by Sir Keir include four Taylor Swift tickets from Universal Music Group totalling £2,800, two tickets from the Football Association at a cost of £598, and four tickets to Doncaster Races from Arena Racing Corporation at £1,939.
An £839 clothing rental agreement with Edeline Lee, the designer recently worn by his wife to London Fashion Week, along with one hour of hair and makeup, was also covered by the PM.
Following the backlash, Sir Keir committed to overhauling hospitality rules for ministers to ensure better transparency about what is provided.
On Wednesday, a Downing Street spokesman said: "The Prime Minister has commissioned a new set of principles on gifts and hospitality to be published as part of the updated ministerial code.”
Ms Jones also said the high-profile Labour peer Waheed Alli was “confident” he had done nothing wrong.
Lord Alli, who has faced scrutiny after donating thousands of pounds’ worth of glasses and suits to Sir Keir, is under investigation by the Lords’ commissioner over “alleged non-registration of interests” leading to a possible breach of the members’ code of conduct.
Ms Jones said: “He will completely cooperate with that investigation, of course, and he’s confident he’s registered everything in the way that he should have done. And that’s that, really. We need to let that investigation run its course.”
Ms Jones added: “You know he’s been a Lord for decades and he’s been very involved in trying to deliver a Labour government for a very long time.
“It’s why he made the donations he did, because he was helping us to do that ... I don’t think there was any question over whether he was trying to influence anything other than to deliver a Labour government.”
She said Lord Alli was also involved in Labour’s 1997 general election campaign, insisting the party was “very grateful” for his donations but that he “is not influencing any policy at all”.
