In speech after speech before the general election Keir Starmer promised to “clean up politics”. But he and others in his cabinet tripped at the first fence, accepting (though transparently declaring) gifts of clothes and tickets: analysis by Tortoise found the shadow cabinet “accepted more than £220,000 worth of free tickets and gifts for themselves or staff over the course of the last parliament” including “Glastonbury, the Proms, the British Grand Prix, Cricket, Wimbledon”. This is puny stuff compared with Covid contracts, where TI found that “multiple red flags in more than £15bn of contracts amounting to a third of all such spending points to more than coincidence or incompetence”. Or the Greensill scandal, when the former prime minister David Cameron lobbied ministers on behalf of a bank for which he worked and which subsequently collapsed. Look at George Osborne’s totally legal but disgraceful booty from myriad financial roles since leaving the Treasury. Accepting clothes and tickets was small potatoes compared with, say, Michelle Mone, but it tarnished the new government at a time when politics was already sinking to an ever lower ebb in public trust.