Next to this, Boris Johnson’s Downing Street wine and cheese hours during the lockdown era seem like small beans. Accounts of Sir Keir Starmer and some of his Labor Party cohorts scooping up pricey freebies, initially dubbed Wardrobegate, are piling up so high that even the wolves of Fleet Street are finding it hard to keep up.

As this scandal unfolds, the perfume of Marie-Antoinette hanging in the damp English autumn air, the new prime minister’s popularity ratings are tanking. According to a new poll, Sir Keir’s approval rating has plummeted 45 points since July, with barely a quarter of voters approving of the job he is doing.

Even the much unloved, famously tone-deaf ex-premier, Rishi Sunak, was more popular than this. The short road from summer election triumph to this state has been paved in part by a seemingly insatiable appetite for expensive clothes and other freebies — a fondness shared by other high-ranking members of the Labor Party. 

Girding the public for spending cuts and higher taxes, as well as cutting winter fuel payments to nearly a million British pensioners, was never going to endear the new Labor government to a lot of people. Neither were widespread reports confirming that Sir Keir has accepted the equivalent of more than $130,000 in free gifts, mainly but not only during his time as opposition leader.

That adds up to more than any other British lawmaker took since 2019. Among the gifts received as prime minister are approximately $3,300 worth of luxury eyeglasses, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes for himself and his wife, Lady Victoria, and tickets to high-profile soccer matches and pop music concerts

Many of the freebies have come courtesy of Lord Waheed Alli, a longtime Labor donor and political fixer now embroiled in controversy too. His generosity toward the Starmers has been rewarded with carte blanche access to 10 Downing Street, resulting in a secondary scandal dubbed “passes for glasses.”

These are bad optics. The canary in the coalmine of Labor’s present plunge emerged in August when the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, was seen dancing the night away with a DJ at a megaclub on the Spanish island of Ibiza. Against criticism — might she not have spent a few more months settling into her new office before partying, or at least frequented a British club? — Ms. Rayner has doubled down, saying, “I like dance music.”

Ms. Rayner, like her boss Sir Keir, likes freebies, too — or what is known in some publicity circles as swag. London’s Private Eye reported that before becoming deputy prime minister Ms. Rayner took a five-night holiday “courtesy of moneybags donor Lord (Waheed) Ali.” 

In June, she received a donation of clothes from Lord Alli worth about $5,000. When Ms. Rayner does get down to business, she wants the world to know. At a Labor party conference Monday it emerged that she hired a taxpayer-funded “vanity photographer” to take photos of her while at work.

She is not alone in indulging tastes for extravagance. This week the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, defended accepting nearly $10,000 worth of clothes from a donor named Juliet Rosefeld during the election campaign as well as free holiday accommodation for her family in Cornwall. 

Westminster rules have it that lawmakers must declare “any interest which someone might reasonably consider to influence their actions or words as an MP.” Declarations are published on a register of members’ financial interests. Sir Keir has maintained that he has been following the rules, although as recently as last week he admitted to making a declaration tardily. 

According to some reports, Labor’s “top team” will stop taking free clothes, but Sir Keir has not categorically said he would no longer accept gifts himself.  On the third day of the Labor party’s conference on Tuesday, some of those team members attempted to deflect attention from the party’s reputational slide by turning their rhetoric on the Tories.

The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, called the Conservatives and “their mates in Reform” as “right-wing wreckers”, while offering nothing to support her statements. Nor was it immediately clear if Ms. Cooper had purchased her own clothes.