AP and AFP
The newspaper La Jornada
Friday, September 20, 2024, p. 23
London. Less than three months after his victory at the polls with the promise of restoring confidence in politics, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is trying to shake off criticism for having accepted gifts, such as dresses for his wife, tickets to a Taylor Swift concert or football matches, worth more than 130 thousand dollars since the end of 2019.
The leader of the Labor Party, who swept to power in a landslide victory on July 4, denies any wrongdoing over the clothes and glasses, worth thousands of dollars, paid for by Waheed Alli, a media mogul who has long donated money to Labor.
The total of their gifts amounts to 51 thousand 959 dollars, in accommodations, work clothes and several pairs of glasses. Starmer, a fan of the London club Arsenal, received invitations to football matches worth more than 53,125 pounds. Tickets for the Taylor Swift concert he attended with his wife in June were worth about 3,011 pounds.
The prime minister is also facing anger from his own staff over the salary of his chief of staff, Sue Gray. The BBC revealed that she receives a salary of $225,000 a year.
The salary is at the top end of a set of pay bands for political advisers, which have risen since the election. The government said it had no role in setting the pay scale.
The salary bands for any civil servant, any advisor, are not set by politicians. There is an official process that does so.Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds said yesterday.
In recent days, the British media has been filled with complaints, mostly anonymous, from government officials about Gray, a former senior civil servant best known for conducting an investigation into lockdown-breaking parties in government buildings during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Gray’s findings contributed to the downfall of Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and his subsequent work with Starmer led the Conservatives to claim that the inquiry into the partygate had a political bias, something Gray denies.
Labour says the leak of Gray’s salary and revelations about donations – known as frockgate in the press, over the dresses worn by the Prime Minister’s wife, Victoria Starmer – are being incited by the Conservatives and their supporters in the media to smear the government.