Polling just dropped on trust in the Labour government – 59% think it’s fairly or very sleazy, according to YouGov, which will be sobering news to the prime minister (seen as more sleazy than Rishi Sunak by 35% of people), even if a bit puzzling on its own terms. Can you be “fairly” sleazy? I’d say trustworthiness is a binary state, like being pregnant: you either are or you aren’t.
The revelations keep coming: Angela Rayner, already in the spotlight for having borrowed the New York apartment of Lord Alli, was revealed to have bought a bespoke suit for former MP Sam Tarry, with her own money, when she was still going out with him. Sleaze-hounds are asking why it wasn’t disclosed on Tarry’s parliamentary register of interests, when I think the answer is pretty obvious: it was a present from his girlfriend.
They’re also asking whether he ever wore the suit to conduct his parliamentary business, when they must know the answer. It’s a suit – where else are you going to wear it, except at work? What exactly is the transgression here? That Rayner bought him anything, or that she bought him something so visible? If she had bought him underpants, would he have been allowed to wear those to work?
It signifies nothing and yet captures everything: I did not want to be parsing the ethical difference between Victoria Starmer’s tailoring and Sam Tarry’s. It’s not time-consuming – many thousands of pounds from a donor is qualitatively and quantitatively worse than a smaller number of pounds from a different category of person – but it is tawdry. I did not expect to be making a quick, gut-level adjudication between Keir Starmer’s football attendance (fine, fine, season-ticket holder already, just sitting in a box to save everyone some hassle) and his Taylor Swift tickets (yeesh, man, what were you even thinking?).
I guess I’m in the 38% who “expected Labour to behave well [and find] they have behaved worse than expected”. (Twenty-five percent of people expected them to behave badly, and found they have; the percentage of people who thought they would be bad and have been pleasantly surprised is – drum roll – three).
The thinktank Demos conducted research at the same time – focus-grouping 32 people across a spectrum of socioeconomic, political, age, ethnic and political situations – to get to the heart of why trust in politicians is so low. Demos discovered that politicians are seen as so remote, so stuck on broadcast rather than receive, so impervious to the lived reality of those they govern, that pretty much anything they say, do or wear will be seen through a lens of: “What are these chancers on about now?”
How has Sue Gray ended up carrying the can for all this? Why does the whole government operation come off as so viperous, every dispute painstakingly leaked, every embarrassing perk immediately trumped by someone else’s greater shame? When you can’t even look at the cabinet without wondering how much their cufflinks cost and who paid for them, it feels like a long road back to a reputation for probity.
I can think of a shortcut, however. Put them all in school uniform, those polyester blazers that make everyone look like the proud new manager of a 60s golf club. Get a solid, reliable designer – no one fancy, someone like Jeff Banks. OK, there is no one like Jeff Banks; it has to be him. Make all their sleeves slightly too long, and then they’ll be not just trustworthy but relatable. Fashion some random logo – a goblin trapped behind a portcullis – and stick it on everything. Make the trousers durable, slightly shiny. Colour-code them by their ties. Paradoxically, making them all look the same might be the first baby step towards believing that they’re not, in fact, all the same.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
