Keir Starmer and his wife don’t need a personal shopper

Well, colour me disappointed. I was among those – mugs, the uncharitable will be quick to call them – who imagined that Sir Keir Starmer represented the arrival of a welcome period of dull, unshowy decency at the top of our politics.

I thought that whatever else he did – disappointed the left; enraged the right; made ‘hard decisions’ that nobody liked – it would be a long time before he was caught making chiselling excuses for accepting freebies, or rewarding donors with favours. His background as a lawyer, his punctilious attention to detail, that whole stiff air of priggishness he brought with him from the campaign trail to Downing Street: these may not have been attractive qualities, may not have been qualities that enhanced his personal charisma (as Boris’s obvious roguishness enhanced his), but they were ones to be respected.

Has Starmer been so quick to have his head turned by the trappings of office? So naïve as to imagine nobody will sweat the small stuff? Yet here we are. First he