Political freebies matter immensely

Britain needs what it has never had: serious rules curtailing money in politics.

- Simon Kuper

It's an odd feeling when your private obsessions go mainstream. In June, I published a book about British corruption. Today, a favoured topic of the national political conversation is the free clothes, and Arsenal and Taylor Swift concert tickets given to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, his wife, and other senior figures in the ruling Labour Party.

It's an international issue, too. New York's Mayor Eric Adams is one of several Americans indicted for allegedly accepting presents from foreign states, in his case fancy travel. And Singapore is jailing a minister for taking gifts, including (of course) tickets to English football matches.

You might dismiss all this as tittle-tattle, a distraction in a time of climate change, war and Donald Trump. But political freebies matter immensely. Nothing destroys trust in politics like the sight of grasping politicians on the make. And once trust goes, voters won't support government action on, say, climate. The usual political beneficiaries are shysters posing as swamp-drainers. So we have to drain the swamp first.

A rare mainstream politician who grasped this was the short-lived Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi. He noticed that voters cared more about MPs' salaries and limousines than about big issues. Small perks registered precisely because they were life-sized and intelligible to every Italian.