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.
I feel like this is not a question that can really be thought about in terms of the normal economic laws of supply and demand, because the role of Prime Minister is kinda sui generis. There's only one of them at a time, and whether the salary is £160k or £300k, that salary is going to be very far down the motivations of anyone actually wanting to become Prime Minister.
Certainly, £160k is enough that you should never have financial worries, even disregarding that many PMs were either born into wealth or had lucrative pre-politics careers. I agree that the salary shouldn't be so low that it excludes those who don't have preexisting wealth, but £160k is quite clearly not such a salary.
It is indeed absurd that Keir Starmer is paid less than the Match Of The Day pundits, but - hear me out here - maybe Micah Richards is really overpaid, instead of Keir Starmer being underpaid.
I'm not particularly averse to the idea of politicians being paid more - as you note it's a tiny fraction of the national budget - but I doubt that any salary would make the role of PM a highly desirable one to successful but normal and not-politically-obsessed people. There are other things that make Westminster politics unappealing to those with achievements elsewhere.
If you wanted to make a case for politicians being paid more, local councillors would be a good place to start. Ideally the councillor's salary should be about £30k, enough to live on; as it is, we expect councillors to juggle caring for their local communities with another full-time job, which shows just how (un)seriously local democracy is taken in this country.
Broadly agree. A couple of points, though:
1. The PM gets a range of benefits that have the effect of substantially increasing overall comp, especially free rent of a large flat in central London and a big country estate, a driver and a car. Those have to be worth several hundred k. And it’s not uncommon for top leaders to have a comp structure in which base pay is only one component (although it’s normally RSUs and LTIPs rather than Chequers…)
2. All of this is driven by idiot press, in my view. It’s totally pernicious. I’ve long thought MPs should be paid substantially more and should also have a flat in a state-owned corporate block in central London, as well as a state-provided and staffed office, and if they want something different, they should fund it themselves. But the Mail would never wear it. Similarly, health service managers are paid peanuts by comparison with private sector managers, even at CEO level. A CEO of a large trust earns a lot less than, say, a CEO of a FTSE 250. Again, the Mail would have conniptions at managers being paid more. They prefer badly paid, overstretched and demotivated managers and in my darker moments, I suspect this is not least because it means they have an endless source of stories when some of those managers stuff things up.