OPINION: Express journalist Aaron Newbury looks at seven Labour figures who prove that for all the talk of integrity, the new establishment looks suspiciously like the old one.
Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer make the list, but don’t top it.
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So much for the party of honesty. Just last year, Labour swept to power promising integrity, competence, and a grown-up Government, and instead it’s beginning to look like the most hypocritical administration in living memory.
The ministers who sneered from the green benches as a tsunami of Tory sleaze have turned out to be pretty good at it themselves. From unlicensed rentals and undeclared freebies to fraud, family dictatorships, and friendships best left unmentioned, the new moral guardians of British politics are deeply entangled in the very scandals they claim to abhor.
Sir Keir Starmer pledged to restore trust in public life, and yet his Cabinet is fast becoming a rogues’ gallery of entitlement, arrogance and astonishingly bad judgment. Behind the polished sound bites and photo ops lies a familiar stench, the whiff of power gone to one’s head.
Here are the seven Labour figures who prove that for all the talk of integrity, the new establishment looks suspiciously like the old one.
7. Keir Starmer
He’s the man who promised to clean up politics and has ended up polishing it instead. Sir Keir Starmer likes to pose as the sober reformer, all sharp suits, smart glasses and moral superiority, but people won’t forget his penthouse, reportedly paid for by Labour donor Lord Alli, any time soon.
The Prime Minister’s fondness for the finer things in life, from corporate hospitality to those Taylor Swift tickets that mysteriously appeared, has turned him into the sort of figure he once mocked. Starmer talks endlessly about “integrity” while surrounding himself with the same Westminster backslappers he vowed to replace.
His Government feels less like a new dawn and more like a continuation of the same champagne hypocrisy: a party elite living it up while warning the rest of us that we might need to tighten our belts again.
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6. Rachel Reeves
Our country’s self-proclaimed guardian of fiscal discipline can’t even, it would seem, manage her own paperwork. Reeves was sensationally caught renting out her Southwark second home without the proper licence, the very same rules she once demanded be enforced to stop “rogue landlords.”
Before that, she was accused of fibbing on her CV, claiming professional credentials she didn’t quite possess. And as ever, her excuse has been that it was all an “inadvertent mistake.”
Funny how those keep happening.
This is the woman who now controls the nation’s finances, and who, if rumours are to be believed, is about to demand we all shell out a bit more in income tax again. She’s the one who lectures small landlords and taxpayers about compliance while breaking her own regulations.
Reeves calls it oversight, but most voters would call it hypocrisy. If she can’t manage a rental agreement, why should anyone trust her with the British economy?
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5. Louise Haigh
It used to be quite rare that you’d get a convicted fraudster kicking it back around the Cabinet table. But that, for a time, was just what we found ourselves with. Former Transport Secretary Louise Haigh, it emerged, once pleaded guilty to insurance fraud while working for Aviva, pocketing money to which she wasn’t entitled.
She then went on to reinvent herself as one of Labour’s voices of fairness, a word that apparently means something different in Sheffield. Starmer talks about giving people second chances, but this one’s stretched it a bit. The idea that a minister with a criminal record should now be in charge of Britain’s transport network was patently absurd. In any other walk of life, a fraud conviction would end your career. In Labour’s Britain, it got her a car and driver, and then permission to stay in her plum job on the back benches.
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4. Tulip Siddiq
It’s hard to talk about Tulip Siddiq without mentioning her aunt, Sheikh Hasina, the long-serving and autocratic former Prime Minister of Bangladesh. While Siddiq insists she keeps politics and family separate, her relatives’ human rights record has made that exceptionally difficult.
Add to that her property portfolio, several homes and a knack for avoiding the “housing crisis” the rest of the country faces, and the image of Labour’s rising London star starts to look a little less humble. Siddiq, once City Minister, talked about fairness while sitting on a pile of prime London real estate.
Her connections are as uncomfortable as her contradictions: a socialist who preaches redistribution while living like the privileged few she claims to oppose.
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3. Lord Hermer
Lord Hermer, the man responsible for handing over our overseas territories, was the key figure behind the Government’s disastrous Chagos Islands deal, a diplomatic giveaway masquerading as progress.
By agreeing to hand sovereignty to Mauritius, Hermer managed to betray both the islanders and Britain’s strategic allies in one stroke. His decision has been hailed in Left-wing circles as “decolonisation,” but to most Britons it looks like weakness masquerading as virtue.
The Chagossians themselves, who have fought for decades to return home, were barely consulted. Labour once accused the Tories of selling out Britain’s interests; Hermer’s “historic agreement” shows they’ve learned from the best.
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2. Angela Rayner
For someone so fond of calling the rich to account, Labour’s now former Deputy Leader seems remarkably forgetful when it comes to her own finances. Rayner’s second (or was it third?) home has become the stuff of legend.
Questions lingered over whether she paid the correct stamp duty, whether she declared it properly, and whether the working-class crusader was a little more comfortable than she lets on.
She insisted she’d done nothing wrong, but the details kept shifting faster than her vowels on Question Time. Rayner built her career attacking privilege, but now it seems she’s its poster girl.
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1. Peter Mandelson
No Labour list of infamy would be complete without the party’s original Prince of Sleaze.
Lord Mandelson, the man who taught New Labour how to lunch, still seems to hover over Westminster like the ghost of scandals past.
Once hailed as the architect of modern Labour, Mandelson now embodies everything the public despises about the political class, a man steeped in arrogance, flaunting his access and forgetting the dodgy bits of his past.
He is the spiritual ancestor of Starmer’s Government, smooth on the surface, slippery underneath.
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Labour promised that the adults would return to the room. Instead, it feels like the bar is open and nobody’s minding the tab. From Starmer’s donor-funded penthouse to Reeves’s unlicensed rental, from Rayner’s housing mystery to Mandelson’s enduring whiff of scandal, the new Government’s halo has slipped fast.
These seven figures illustrate how quickly power can curdle into privilege. They talk about fairness and integrity while living by an entirely different set of rules. The problem isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s contempt, the sense that the people who run Britain think they’re above it.
Starmer’s greatest political weapon was moral superiority, and now that’s gone. The country that voted for “change” is starting to realise it’s got the same old faces in better suits. And if this is Labour’s idea of a sleaze free Government, god knows what they think a real scandal is.
