There’s been much recent discussion of the Prime Minister’s acceptance of donations in kind, including clothes for himself and his wife, glasses and sports tickets. My own view is that whether or not the rules have been broken, it’s incredibly tone-deaf for someone who stood on a platform of rectitude and “not being like the others” to be sucked into this kind of argument. Thanks to a long career in law, there’s no argument that Starmer's a pretty rich guy, and he can afford to pay for his own glassses.
Yet, I’d like to make the unpopular case that the current situation is absurd, because we should be paying the Prime Minister a whole lot more.
Think about the skills we’d like to see from our leader. We want someone with a reasonable level of understanding of economics, law and science. They need to be articulate enough to make their case off the cuff in Parliament and charismatic enough to represent us on the world stage. We’d like them to have good judgement and attention to detail, and the ability to chair meetings on a range of topics throughout long and exhausting days including working across timezones on international issues. We trust them with the defence of the country, and ask them to help fix long-standing systemic issues in education, health and social care. They have to put up with press scrutiny of themselves and their families, and social media abuse.
And in return, we pay them less than half as much as the guy whose job it is to sit on the Match of the Day sofa for one day per week and say “well, Gary, what’s happened there is he’s kicked it and it’s gone in the goal”.
Of course we can argue whether our recent Prime Ministers have lived up to the lofty standards that I’ve described above. But I think it’s also worth considering whether the insultingly low salary has played a part in putting off the kind of candidates that we’d like to see.
Up until 2010, the PM was paid a sensible wage. Wikipedia tells me that the salary at that point was £194k. If you put that in the Bank of England inflation calculator, it would be £290k now, not out of line with the £306k earned by Olaf Scholz or Joe Biden’s £304k. Whereas, in the most recent year for which Wikipedia gives us data, our leader claimed a salary of … £160k, or a 45% real terms pay cut.
The fact that Starmer’s salary is lower than Gordon Brown’s largely dates back to Brown’s voluntary decision in the last month of his Premiership to take a 25% pay cut, locking in his successors at a time of austerity. None of them subsequently have had the courage or the political capital to argue for a restoration of a sensible salary.
Because we’re unable to have grown up conversations about anything in this country, we’ve ended up in a situation where the leader of a nuclear-armed permanent member of the UN Security Council, trusted to run the world’s sixth largest economy, is paid less than the general manager of a Buc-ee’s. It’s laughable.
You might question whether we can afford to pay the Prime Minister more. Given that Starmer’s salary represents 0.000013% of an overall £1,226 billion annual Government spend, I’m going to say we can risk it. It doesn’t stretch credibility to think that paying a salary which attracted better candidates might pay for itself thousands of times over.
Perhaps there’s an argument that salaries in the area of public service should indeed be lower, and yet you can easily find directors of charities like the National Trust, Age UK and Amnesty International earning more than our leader. Starmer earns somewhere between the Deputy Chief Executive and the Chief Executive of a medium-sized NHS trust, and we’re meant to think that’s normal?
Like I say, I know this isn’t a popular stance, but it’s the only sensible one. We need to double the Prime Minister’s salary, and then he can pay for his own glasses.
I agree and I’ve been saying the same for years in particular related to MPs…. We pay peanuts and wonder we get monkeys.
I’d love to see a Jim Ratcliffe or the like as our PM but why would they want to go into our toxic political system. Am I alone in thinking there’s no big beasts now like there used to be?
That brings me to the next point…. Our media are risible and the current low rent gotcha mentality be it on red, yellow or blue is painful to watch.
Finally, Starmer should’ve known better but they can’t resist it. For the last 20 years of my career accepting any hospitality was banned. I couldn’t even pick up a pen. U.K. politics should be the same.
I'm not sure the pay and glasses are linked. If his reported wealth is correct then accepting trivial sums seems an error of judgement.
IMHO the problem actually starts with MPs.
As far as I can work out they really have two roles, to read and vote on legislation and that of casework. There seem to be far too many MPs for the national press to really hold them to account. So the quality of their casework varies massively and the median voter has little experience with this and tends to vote on who they want to lead the country. Worse safe constituencies seem to be used as rewards internally with candidates being parachuted into them.
MPs clearly don't read or understand the legislation they are passing, one has only to look at the 5p tax where it only came out a year later that MPs realized what they had voted for.