When I left the house earlier today, I stopped in the hallway for a moment to think about the shoes I wanted to wear. On weekdays, in the morning, there are usually only two choices. Today, I picked the black leather loafers, which I bought in France last year. The other option, which I considered but then discarded, was a pair of Adidas Sambas, the trainers made both famous and uncool by, of all people, Rishi Sunak.
One of them has blue stripes and the other has red ones; they arrived at my house, in a neat little box, around a week before the election last summer. For the avoidance of doubt, I didn’t buy them. I like my clothing to sometimes be eccentric, but even I wouldn’t have bought a pair of mismatched shoes. Instead, they’d been sent to me by a large media company, as part of a campaign package.
Also in the bag were pouches of premade cocktails, a mug, a can of beer, and a few other trinkets I no longer remember. It was similar to the one I received back in 2020, a few days before the US election. That one also featured a mug, but the footwear was limited to a pair of quite snazzy, branded socks. They were surprisingly warm and comfortable, and I still wear them every winter.
If I’m honest, I never thought twice about these gifts. They were nice, sure, but hardly life-changing. Besides, that company isn’t the only one to send over all forms of goodies – more often than not alcoholic in nature – to Westminster denizens.
You work in or around politics, and so people give you free stuff. That’s just how it is. Or is it?
Rachel Reeves recently came under fire for accepting free tickets to a Sabrina Carpenter gig, and has now stated that she “wouldn’t do it again”. “I felt I was doing the right thing but I do understand perceptions,” she told Good Morning Britain, as she explained that she wouldn’t “take concert tickets in the future”. Do take note of the narrow nature of that pledge.
It was hardly the scandal of the century, but clearly irked a number of people. The chancellor of the exchequer recently ushered in a new era of austerity, which will see hundreds of thousands of people getting poorer. Her salary is consequential, so why can’t she just pay for her own gig tickets, and the security that comes with it if needs be? Most importantly, however, this frustration came from the fact that – well, we’ve been there before.
You will surely remember “wardrobe gate”, in which multiple senior Labour figures, including Keir Starmer, were found to have taken money from various donors and used it to buy and rent clothes, both for themselves and, in the prime minister’s case, for their partner. The MPs, who had until then campaigned on a “whiter than white”, “let’s bring integrity back into politics after years of sleaze” platform, were left in an awkward position. If they were so anti-sleaze, then why behave in that way?
The answer to both this question and the other obvious one – “why did Reeves keep accepting freebies after all that?” is a simple one: people are products of their environment. New arrivals in Westminster may find it
odd that every event will have free alcohol, and it’s possible and indeed easy to go from free lunch to free dinner on a near daily basis. They may frown at the somehow ever-present lobbyists at party conferences, whose sole job seems to be to pay for the rounds being ordered at hotel bars.
Still, the cues they will get from the veterans around them is that all of it is normal. Over time, they will come to believe it too. Over time, I came to believe it too! I took the free drinks and meals and tickets to various events, and I didn’t question it. In my defence, I feel quite strongly that it never influenced my work. I’ve been wined and dined by at least one global tech giant more times than I can count, but my views on global tech giants haven’t moved one iota. I’ll take the sushi but still call you out for destroying the internet I once loved, thank you very much.
Of course, there are two problems here. The first is that rules shouldn’t be created with virtuous people in mind. The second is that you shouldn’t trust even virtuous people to grade their own homework. I sincerely believe that all those freebies never influenced my work, but am I correct in saying so? There’s just no real way to know.
Humans are social animals and we’ll happily take behavioural cues from our environment, which is precisely why the environment ought to change. MPs fiddling their expenses was normal until it wasn’t; we all took those free things for granted for a long time, and we probably shouldn’t have. Just because something feels normal doesn’t mean it won’t corrode your soul, over time, bit by bit, without you even noticing it.
