Labour freebies row deepens as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Sue Gray enjoyed hundreds of pounds-worth of hospitality tickets to several football matches
Sue Gray enjoyed hundreds of pounds-worth of hospitality tickets to several football matches, it was reported last night.
The Prime Minister’s chief of staff received tickets to the North London derby at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in April and another Premier League football fixture at the same venue a month before, according to the Daily Telegraph.
Details of the two new freebies come after The Mail on Sunday revealed Ms Gray, Sir Keir Starmer Foreign Secretary David Lammy shared lavish hospitality in a corporate box at Tottenham Hotspur to watch the side’s 1-0 loss to Arsenal last month.
The Telegraph reported that Ms Gray first accepted matchday hospitality from Tottenham Hotspur during the club’s 3-1 win against Crystal Palace in March.
This was followed by a match in which Spurs lost 3-2 to Arsenal at the same stadium the next month, bringing the number of match days she has enjoyed hospitality at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium to at least three.
The Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Sue Gray, received tickets to the North London derby at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in April and another Premier League football fixture at the same venue a month before, according to the Daily Telegraph
Critics say the invites threatens the PM’s impartiality over the planned football regulator, which would have the power to stop teams joining breakaway leagues and to block investment from controversial countries
Details of the two new freebies come after The Mail on Sunday revealed Ms Gray, Sir Keir Starmer Foreign Secretary David Lammy shared lavish hospitality in a corporate box at Tottenham Hotspur last month
Critics say the invites threatens the PM’s impartiality over the planned football regulator, which would have the power to stop teams joining breakaway leagues and to block investment from controversial countries.
Ms Gray also enjoyed a two-day trip to the networking Braemar Summit in the Scottish Highlands in September last year, days after becoming Sir Keir’s chief of staff.
The event has been nicknamed ‘McDavos’.
It comes amid the growing row over freebies engulfing Sir Keir’s premiership.
On Friday it emerged the PM has accepted £32,000-worth of clothing donations from Labour peer Lord Alli – double the amount he had previously declared.
And on Sunday it was revealed that a second central London property belonging to Lord Alli was made available to the PM and other senior party figures in the run-up to the election.
It comes amid the growing row over freebies engulfing Sir Keir’s premiership. On Friday it emerged the PM has accepted £32,000-worth of clothing donations from Labour peer Lord Alli – double the amount he had previously declared
The Georgian townhouse in Soho was used for strategy meetings, while the PM and his family moved into a nearby £18million townhouse in Covent Garden – also owned by the peer – during the election.
The scandal sparked the resignation of now-independent MP Rosie Duffield on Saturday, who said ‘the sleaze, nepotism and apparent avarice’ of Sir Keir’s administration ‘are off the scale’.
The PM has received many more freebies than any other MP since becoming Labour leader, receiving £107,145-worth since 2019, including for dozens of football matches and concerts.
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Liz Truss claims Tories would have done better at the election if she had STAYED as PM instead of Rishi Sunak – and says critics of her disastrous mini-Budget are ‘economically illiterate’
Liz Truss today claimed that the Tories would have done better at the general election if she had remained prime minister.
In a punchy appearance at the Conservative Party Conference the former leader, who was forced from office in 2022 after her disastrous mini-budget, stopped short of saying she could have beaten Keir Starmer.
But she defiantly claimed that she would have done a better job than successor Rishi Sunak.
In a cosy chat with the Daily Telegraph the former MP also said that critics of her mini-budget, which sent the markets into turmoil and led to interest rates spiking, were guilty of ‘economic illiteracy’.
She went on to say that ‘powerful institutions’ like the Bank of England ‘sought to undermine me’ and make her a scapegoat for their own mistakes.
‘The Tories are no longer the party of the establishment,’ she said.
She also repeated her backing for Donald Trump to win the US presidential election and launched an attack on ‘wokeism’.
Asked if the country under Labour was ‘on the road to socialism’, the former prime minister told the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley: ‘We are already a socialist country.
In a punchy appearance at the Conservative Party Conference the former leader, who was forced from office in 2022 after her disastrous mini-budget, stopped short of saying she could have beaten Keir Starmer.
But she defiantly claimed that she would have done a better job than successor Rishi Sunak.
In a cosy chat with the Daily Telegraph the former MP also said that critics of her mini-budget, which sent the markets into turmoil and led to interest rates spiking, were guilty of ‘economic illiteracy’.
‘We have huge swathes of the economy controlled by regulation and the bureaucracy,’ she said.
Ms Truss said this was a ‘cumulative effect’ of Brown and Blairite policies and then decisions by Tories who came after.
The former prime minister said she does not think the Conservatives can say all the problems are caused by Labour.
‘A lot of the problems we are facing now are as a result of us failing to turn things around,’ she said.
She went on to say that ‘powerful institutions’ like the Bank of England ‘sought to undermine me’ and make her a scapegoat for their own mistakes.
As well as criticising Mr Sunak she also levelled criticism at predecessor but one Theresa May, who used a newspaper article at the weekend to attack the mini-Budget.
Ms Truss made a quip about the 2017 election, in which Mrs May squandered the Tory majority, before saying she did not want to get into a ‘slanging match’.
She added the four Tory leadership candidates have not acknowledged how bad things are in the party.
‘So far, I haven’t seen any of the candidates really acknowledge how bad things are in the country as a whole, and frankly, for the Conservative Party.
The former prime minister said there was a ‘Panglossian’ view among them that the party needs to unite.
They think ‘all we need to do is show competence, and we will be ushered back into office’, she said, adding: ‘They have to explain what went wrong, why things are so bad for the Conservatives and what they’re actually going to do.’
Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper said: ‘Liz Truss’s failure to recognise the economic vandalism that she oversaw is a kick in the teeth to all those who endured their mortgage rates spiralling and were worried about losing their homes as a result of her disastrous policies.
‘It’s outrageous that instead of calling out the damage that she did, the Conservative Party actually allowed her to stand as one of their candidates at the General Election.
‘Every Conservative Party Leadership candidate must condemn Truss’s terrible record and pledge that they would strip her of her ex-PM allowance of up to £115,000 a year.’
