Never mind the freebies, Starmer is paid peanuts compared with what he could earn as a lawyer
We have heard a lot recently about the prime ministerial salary (not to mention all the freebies that seem to go with the territory). Keir Starmer is paid £166,000 a year, hardly a king’s ransom (talking of whom, Charles gets £86 million through the so-called Sovereign Grant) but a good deal better than the UK average salary of £35,000.
Perks? The flat at Number Ten is rent free as is Chequers but only official entertaining is paid for by us. If the Starmers have friends round for dinner or to stay the weekend in the Buckinghamshire countryside they pay for it themselves (or maybe that nice Lord Alli does).
Compared with other people with hugely responsible jobs the prime minister is paid peanuts. Well, Waitrose smoked cashew nuts anyway. A commercial KC will easily clear £1m in annual fees, so too will partners at leading consultancies like EY and PWC; the ceo of a big company will earn far in excess of that and that’s without the share options and vast expense accounts. And how many of them are on call 24 hours of every day of the year as Starmer is and all his predecessors were?
In fact it’s only since the 1980s that British premiers began to feel the squeeze. Pre-war, Neville Chamberlain was paid £10,000-a-year, the equivalent today of £815,000. Ditto Churchill who couldn’t survive on it: the bill for his gargantuan intake of Johnnie Walker Black Label, Hine cognac and vintage Pol Roger probably accounted for most of that.
By the ‘60s the annual reward had increased to £14,000, or in today’s terms £342,000, and a decade later it was £20k or exactly a third of a million today.
Put in a personal context, when I left the Express in 1995 I was earning (in today’s money) 40 per cent more than the prime minister. And I wasn’t the highest paid hack there (Nick Lloyd of course, Jean Rook and Ross Benson that I knew of). Plus a very generous expense account, pension plan, shares and a decent car. Those were indeed the days and such largesse is probably only enjoyed now at the top of the Mail titles and possibly at The Times.
We really were the lucky generation.
*****
The ever-excellent Chichester Festival Theatre has just begun a short run of Redlands, Charlotte Jones’ account of the 1967 drugs bust of the Rolling Stones at Keith Richards’ house in the Sussex countryside. Most of us will remember the hoo-hah at the time, an apparent stitch-up between the News of the World and Inspector Knacker involving a raid by 18 officers who searched high and low for anything more interesting than a packet of Benson and Hedges.
Jagger was sentenced three months and Richards a year before an unlikely saviour came along, William Rees-Mogg, editor of The Times who wrote the famous Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel leader. Both Stones were released on appeal and the Establishment was shown to be an ass.
Most revealing and worth watching is a World in Action programme in which Jagger is gently quizzed by Rees-Mogg, John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, Frank Soskice (Wilson’s Home Secretary and a former Attorney General), and Fr Tom Corbishley, the Jesuit priest. Far from being a clash of generations and morals, it was more a meeting of very middle-class minds.
Jagger, who I had interviewed two years earlier, was on his very best behaviour and came over exactly what he was, a clever grammar school boy who studied accountancy (yes really) at LSE, the son of a Tory activist mother and every bit as well spoken, and as smart, as his interviewers.
The programme is available on YouTube and it’s a wonderful piece of social history. Not to be missed.
*****
What do you think JMW Turner would make of the annual art prize awarded in his name? Utter bollocks or worse depending on the great man’s range of withering verdicts. The latest crapfest (technical term) has attracted universal opprobrium and features, among other items, an old Ford Escort topped with a crocheted doily and a giant concrete bracelet. No doubt they have some great cultural significance which this simple soul has missed.
Our friend Anna MacLeod is a brilliant landscape artist and my chum Colin Bateman is one of the world’s leading portraitists (the late Queen and Seamus Heaney among his distinguished sitters) and both bring huge pleasure and some wonder to the viewer. Not so the Turner shortlisted pseuds.
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition occasionally falls into the same trap as it did when I wandered around a few years ago and came across a model of a rather flabby penis captioned Fuck You. No doubt some eejit thought themselves ground-breakingly brilliant and original; the rest of us just raised a laconic eyebrow.
Some of my fellow attendees were distinctly strange too, so much so that Thackery, looking at one of them, asked if he was a viewer or an exhibit.
*****
Sir Patrick Sergeant, legendary City Editor of the Daily Mail, has died aged 100. In the early ‘70s when I was on the Mail, Edward Heath’s hapless chancellor Anthony Barber was scuttling around endlessly trying to deal with the so-called Gnomes of Zurich.
One Sunday evening I had acres of copy in front of me from which I had to write the Splash. Lacking various vital ingredients, I asked the news desk to call Sargeant (then far-from-plain Mister) for the answers.
The call went like this: ‘Mr Sargeant’s residence.’
‘Could I speak to Mr Sargeant please?’
‘I’m sorry sir, Mr Sargeant is dining and cannot come to the phone.’
‘Who is this?’
‘I am Mr Sargeant’s butler sir.’
At which point deputy editor Louis Kirby became involved and reverted to his Liverpool roots. Patrick Sargeant, dinner or not, was filing within minutes.
*****
And finally... still not a peep from the normally loquacious Michael Cole.
ALAN FRAME
26 September 2024
