Only five MPs disclosed clothing gifts in past decade

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Only five MPs registered free clothing from external donors in the entire decade before the last financial year, a Financial Times analysis of the Commons register of interests showed.

There has been criticism of Labour’s three most senior figures accepting clothing donations of up to £60,000 in the year running up to July’s election — sums that appear to be far higher than those historically disclosed by MPs.

Allies of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer have suggested it is not irregular for party leaders to receive generous clothing donations from wealthy backers.

“All MPs get gifts,” Starmer even told reporters last month.

Yet the fact that only five MPs disclosed free clothing suggests that garment gifting was not historically commonplace.

In 2016, then Labour MP Chuka Umunna took a £1,600 suit from Alexandra Wood, a Savile Row tailor. In December 2020 Sir Ed Davey, who is now leader of the Liberal Democrats, took £1,500 from a donor named Richard Duncalf to buy a suit.

In 2021, Conservative MP Caroline Nokes was gifted two second-hand items from a company called Recycled By worth £675.

In January 2022 Naz Shah, Labour MP for Bradford West, acknowledged accepting two suits worth £600 each from IK Collections in Bradford. In the same year, Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski received a cashmere suit worth £760 from a luxury Mongolian company called Gobi Cashmere.

By contrast the sums involved in the current furore over Labour freebies taken over the past year run into the tens of thousands of pounds.

Starmer declared £16,200 of free clothing from Labour donor Lord Waheed Alli in April this year, with two other donations worth another £16,000 used for clothes.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves received £7,500 of money for clothing from a friend called Juliet Rosenfeld, while deputy prime minister Angela Rayner accepted £3,550 of clothing from Alli.

A separate £17,650 given by Alli to Rayner in three instalments was also used to buy clothes as well as cover other, unspecified costs.

All were initially declared as office costs. That raises the possibility that other MPs in the past also received clothing without declaring it as such.

“With trust in politicians at rock bottom, the freebie fiasco must be a wake-up call to Westminster to urgently lay down much stricter guidelines for when MPs can accept donations and hospitality and how they declare them,” said Susan Hawley, executive director of transparency group Spotlight on Corruption.

Ed Miliband, who led the Labour party from 2010 to 2015, told the BBC recently that he was not the recipient of any free clothing during that period. “No I didn’t. But I’m not going to make judgments about this,” he said. “I have met very few people in politics who are more in it for the right reasons than Keir Starmer.”

This week, Downing Street said Starmer will pay back £6,000 for tickets including for a Taylor Swift concert he received since becoming prime minister, while promising a new code on donations.

But he has so far declined to reimburse for any of the donations he received while leader of the opposition.

Starmer, Reeves and Rayner have also said they will no longer accept any clothing donations.

Under current rules, government ministers are banned from keeping donations over a certain threshold of £140, and must either hand over the gifts to their departments or pay market price to keep them.

The Conservative party appears to have paid in the past for clothing for its leaders — and their spouses — but from its general funds, rather than from specific millionaire donors.

“In the case of Samantha Cameron, I think what happened . . . the Conservative party out of its general funds, money that had been donated it, did provide money for the leader of the opposition — as he was then — and then prime minister to look smart and for his wife to look smart,” said George Osborne, former chancellor, on his podcast. “But there was not a direct link to a donor.”

A Conservative spokesperson said the party had not provided a clothing allowance for the previous prime minister, Rishi Sunak. He was unable to provide any clarity about such arrangements before 2022.