Where is Starmer’s purpose?

“We’re not as bad as the Tories”.

That is how Labour ministers and officials frame the last few days of news stories about lavish gifts of clothes and entertainment to the PM and his senior ministers.

That may be factually accurate: the monetary value of Boris Johnson’s donated Caribbean holiday and No10 flat refurb may be a multiple of Starmer’s football seats and almost £19k of clothing and spectacles, or Rayner’s NY holiday pad and clobber, or Reeves’s power suits.

But it is to miss the point.

Starmer as Labour leader has said for years that his primary ambition is to restore trust in politics and politicians, against a backdrop of chronic and escalating public mistrust of our elected representatives.

And here is why what some have characterised as Goonergate - after Starmer’s Arsenal FC obsession (which I share) - matters. It plays into the cancerous narrative that there is no such thing as an honest politician, that they’re all in it for themselves.

It was the failure to promptly disclose all gifts, as much as the gifts themselves, that creates the impression that Labour ministers have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar.

This is dangerous for faith in democracy when 40% of British people couldn’t be bothered to vote in the last election, in spite of the national security and economic emergencies we face.

And it is self-harming for a Labour Party that won its apparently unassailable parliamentary majority with only one in five British people voting for it.

Some ministers curse so-called right-wing media for exaggerating the transgressions. But as Cherie Blair once said to me, complaining about the British press is about as productive as moaning about British weather.

And anyway, the supposedly hostile reporters and editors are the same people Starmer and his team courted and fawned to during the election campaign. Reaping and sowing come to mind.

There are two big lessons.

First is that Starmer must close the gap urgently between his rhetoric and administrative reality. Saying that he stands for new transparent honest politics jars with a decision by his office not to automatically and instinctively disclose a £5k donation of clothes and fashion items made by a party donor Waheed Alli to his wife.

Second, the sheer volume of the furore around the gifts is an illustration of the cast-iron law that politics abhors a vacuum.

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If Starmer since being elected had engaged the nation in a very specific project of national renewal, the free frocks and Arsenalboxes might have seemed annoying oversights, misdemeanours at worst.

Starmer has loudly, repeatedly and credibly warned that the economy and public services are a disaster area inherited from the Tories. But the public recognised that in delivering the worst election result for the Conservatives in more than a hundred years.

What voters who rejected the Tories wish to know - including millions of them who voted Reform, LibDem and Green, rather than Labour - is what difference Starmer will make.

They didn’t much like that the first “bold” and unexpected choice of a new Labour PM and Chancellor would be to take up to £300 from millions of pensioners, many on low incomes, by abolishing universal entitlement to the winter fuel credit.

Reeves and Starmer insist it is a symbol of the truth they want us to know, that things must necessarily get worse before they get better, and they won’t shy away from painful decisions to fix the public finances.

To be clear it is only a symbol or gesture. Public services require tens of millions of pounds of additional investment. The winter fuel saving is a rounding error compared to the financial needs of hospitals, armed forces, law and order, and so on.

But even acknowledging this symbolic value points to a hole: what exactly is the point of all the sacrifices Starmer wants us to make?

Which brings me to my purpose in coming to Labour’s first annual conference in government since 2009 - which is to see if I can properly understand Keir Starmer’s purpose for being in government.

Will he at last begin to describe what British ambition and success means to him, in terms that allow the question “are we there yet?” to mean something?

“At least we’re better than the last lot” may be plausible but it hardly matches the challenges of our turbulent times.

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