Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been caught up in Labour’s freebies row after it emerged that she accepted £7,500 towards the cost of clothes since the start of last year.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said she will not accept such donations in the future (Image: Getty)
The Chancellor – who will no longer accept such donations – took the cash from a friend, Juliet Rosenfeld, to pay for worth clothing including suits.
While the donations were declared, the Chancellor did not explicitly state that the money was spent on clothing, prompting more questions about transparency in the wake of revelations about Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner.
Ms Reeves’ team has consulted parliamentary authorities and believes the declarations were in line with the rules, because the donations were in the form of money as opposed to direct gifts of clothing.
Nevertheless, the revelation comes at awkward time for the Government over donations accepted by senior figures.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (Image: Getty)
Sir Keir and Ms Rayner have also announced they will stop taking free clothing after calls from Labour MPs for the party leadership to do so.
The move comes after days of negative headlines about Sir Keir taking clothing and glasses funded by donations, including £16,200 in “work clothing” for himself and £5,000 in personal shopping for his wife from Labour peer Lord Alli.
The timing of this decision, just days before Labour’s annual conference in Liverpool, indicates concerns within No 10 about the impact of this controversy on the government’s public image.
Despite initial attempts to downplay the issue, it seems that the party leadership has been forced to reconsider the appropriateness of such donations.
Angela Rayner arrives at Downing Street (Image: Getty)
While the decision currently only applies to clothing, other gifts – such as tickets to Arsenal games matches and concerts – remain a point of contention, with several Labour MPs calling for stricter rules across the board. Ms Reeves, Sir Keir, and Ms Rayner are now facing pressure from their own party to repay the donations they’ve received.
Sir Keir earlier this week sought to defend his decision to accept football freebies, insisting prevented him from sitting in his regular seat.
He said: “If I don’t accept hospitality, I can’t go to the game. 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.”
Party insiders are understood to be very angry about the ongoing row.
Speaking about the PM, one told the Daily Telegraph: “He should stop taking freebies immediately. It gives the impression that he’s more interested in himself than he is about the difficult situation facing the poorest in our country who we are supposed to represent.
“I don’t know of anyone who thinks this is a good idea. Friends and colleagues are mortified.” Baroness Harman, the former acting Labour leader, told Sky News: “I think doubling down and trying to justify it is… making things worse.”
She added: “He just needs to say, right, with hindsight, I’m going to do things differently and this is how I’m going to do it in future.”
Since the start of last year, Ms Reeves has received four donations, totalling £7,367, from Ms Rosenfeld, described by Ms Reeves’ team as a long-standing friend.
Ms Rosenfeld, a psychotherapist and author, is the widow of Andrew Rosenfeld, a multimillionaire businessman who died in 2015 at the age of 52 from cancer. He became a significant Labour donor and lent £1 million to Tony Blair’s party before the 2005 general election.
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Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner say they’ll no longer accept free clothes
Angela Rayner, Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves will no longer accept clothes donations (Image: Getty)
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”.
Sir Keir Starmer said security concerns meant not accepting Arsenal hospitality would have cost taxpayers a ‘fortune’ (Image: Getty)
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”.
