Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner have all announced that they will no longer accept donations of free clothes.

Downing Street confirmed the move just hours before the party’s top brass convene in Liverpool for its annual conference.

It comes after a scandal hit senior figures in the Labour Party this week as it was revealed the PM has accepted the most donations out of any Member of Parliament in recent years.

According to a league table put together by Sky News,

 Sir Keir has received two-and-a-half times more in gifts and hospitality than the next highest MP, accepting £107,145 worth of gifts, benefits, and hospitality since December 2019.

The freebies were listed in Parliament’s register of MPs’ interests in line with Commons rules. The Premier League has given Sir Keir almost £40,000 in football tickets, and is one of the largest providers of hospitality to the Labour leader.

He declared £12,588 in gifts ranging from four Taylor Swift tickets worth £4,000 during the election campaign, to Euros final tickets valued at £1,628, and several Arsenal match tickets exceeding £6,000 in total.

The row began over the weekend after it was revealed Labour peer Waheed Alli gave the Labour premier large sums for his work wardrobe, including £2,435 worth of glasses and £16,200 worth of work clothing.

Deputy leader Angela Rayner also has accepted clothing donations, to the value of £2,230, Sky News reports.

Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, received a total of £7,500 from a donor called Juliet Rosenfeld from January 2023 to May 2024 that was used to pay for clothing, people with knowledge of the gifts claimed, the Financial Times reports.

It is understood that they were registered as donations “to support the shadow chancellor’s office”.

 

But the Prime Minister has continued to insist it was his right to accept “hospitality” to watch Arsenal,

 as security concerns mean he can’t watch in his normal seat at the Emirates Stadium.

“If I don’t accept hospitality, I can’t go to the game,” Sir Keir said earlier this week. “You could say: ‘Well, bad luck.’ That’s why gifts have to be registered. But never going to an Arsenal game again because I can’t accept hospitality is pushing it a bit far.”

Sir Keir has even faced critcism from within his own party, with Baroness Harriet Harman saying last night that the Labour leader’s “doubling down” on the clothing row was making it “worse”.

Harman, who sits in the House of Lords, stressed that it was not a “hanging offence”, but suggested the PM should be open about having made a “misstep”.