Starmer accepted £76k worth of gifts including tickets to 20 football matches

Sir Keir Starmer accepted £76,000 in hospitality, clothes and other gifts from British donors during the last Parliament, figures show.

The Labour leader, on track to become prime minister on Friday, accepted more than 20 free football match tickets and complimentary concert tickets and clothing.

The five-figure sum is among the highest claimed by any MP in the past five years, an analysis by the Financial Times revealed.

In April, Sir Keir received £16,200 for “work clothing”, in addition to £2,485 for “multiple pairs of glasses”, from Lord Alli, a Labour peer and a former chairman of Asos.

He was spotted wearing a £500 hoodie from Sandro, a French fashion house, in the first full week of the general election campaign.

Sir Keir is a lifelong fan of Arsenal and has enjoyed complimentary tickets to see them play Manchester United, Manchester City and Porto.

He also received a free ticket to England’s defeat to Italy in the Euro 2020 final, attended Adele’s hometown concert at Hyde Park in 2022 and accepted four tickets worth £698 to see Coldplay at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium last summer.

Earlier this month, Sir Keir and his wife Victoria went to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour at Wembley Stadium and were understood to have received free tickets.

Sir Keir has insisted there is no conflict of interest in accepting hospitality from the Premier League, which is opposed to some of Labour’s plans to overhaul football regulation.

“That’s why we have a register of declarations for MPs, for exactly that reason,” he said on Monday. “Everybody, yourself included, can see who donated, what it was for and how much it is, so that you can ensure there’s no conflict of interest, as I would ensure there’s no conflict of interest.”

Sir Keir has said freebies he has accepted have been “properly” declared. Speaking to reporters at a warehouse in north-east Derbyshire, the Labour leader said: “The system is one where if we take any contribution or donation of any sort that is all set out and declared. And that’s what we’ve done properly on my behalf.

“Quite a lot of that was Arsenal hospitality, particularly away games where, as you can appreciate, my desire to go in the stands is not always met with approval by the security teams around me, which inevitably means that I’m in corporate hospitality if I want to see the game.”

The most recent register of interests shows that Sir Keir accepted freebies including a private box for four at Epsom Downs racecourse worth £3,716 in June 2023 and £16,200 of work clothing from Labour peer and entrepreneur Lord Waheed Ali in April.

MPs must declare any gifts, benefits or hospitality with a value of over £300 which they receive from a UK source to the register of interests, which is updated fortnightly while Parliament is sitting.

They are expected to declare anything that might reasonably be thought by others to influence their actions or words as an MP.

In 2022, Sir Keir was found to have breached the MPs’ code of conduct in a “minor and/or inadvertent” way after he failed to register eight interests on time.

These included the use of a directors’ box at Crystal Palace, where he watched Arsenal slump to a 3-0 defeat on April 4 that year. He did not register the visit until May 5.

He also declared four tickets for Arsenal versus Watford on March 6 2022, two months after the game, and declared tickets for his staff for the British Kebab Awards once the deadline had passed.