Starmer drama karma

You're working for no one but me

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.