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While Labour’s move to axe the Winter Fuel Payment has left two million pensioners facing a tricky choice between eating and heating their home, Starmer has been forced to make difficult decisions of his own.
Should he accept £4,000 tickets to see Taylor Swift play live? Or Adele? Coldplay? Arsenal at home? The Wimbledon Royal Box? Or maybe another posh frock for his wife?
In the end it wasn’t so hard. He took the lot.
He also snapped up free seats at the National Theatre, tickets to the Jingle Bell Ball at the 02, and a new pair of designer spectacles.
As the Labour PM inflicts austerity on the nation, he accepts lavish hospitality for himself. You can check out the full list of freebies here.
Starmer has always seen himself as an exception, even before he became Labour leader.
While Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), for five years between 2008 and 2013, he billed taxpayers for expenses averaging around £50,000 a year.
Successor Alison Saunders only billed for a third of his astonishing haul.
Highlights include more than £160,000 for chauffeur-driven car in London, despite living four miles from Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) office.
He also billed for a string of first or business class flights, including £20k on four flights to Washington DC.
These claims were on top of his salary, which totalled £1 million over five years plus £336,000 in pension benefits.
I wrote about Starmer’s pension in February and again in June.
I was shocked and impressed at how generous it was. What I didn’t realise then is that it’s part of a pattern.
His combined pension pots are thought to top £1million. Now on a PM’s salary of £167,000, they will continue to roll up nicely.
Yet it’s the pension dating from his DPP stint that caught my attention
Starmer had carved a one-man exemption from a brutal 55% tax on larger pots knows as the pensions lifetime allowance (LTA).
Starmer was the sole member and beneficiary of a “tax-unregistered” pension scheme, designed to avoid the lethal levy.
Under the LTA, anybody with pensions totalling more than £1,073,100 faced a punitive “horror” tax that took 55% of the surplus.
Almost two million were at risk, including public sector workers such as top NHS doctors, police officers, senior teachers and military top brass. But one man was exempt.
In March last year, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt abolished the LTA.
Labour immediately declared this a tax break for the rich and pledged to restore it.
Later, it quietly dropped the plan.
Now I’m wondering whether that was because it would have focused attention on Starmer’s cunning opt out.
He could hardly restore a tax that he had worked so hard to escape himself. That would be “extraordinary hypocrisy”, in the words of Tory MP Andrea Leadsom.
Nobody could seriously accuse Sir Keir of that, could they?
Other senior Labour figures will also benefit from Labour’s decision to axe the LTA.
One of them is Sue Gray, who Starmer appointed Downing Street chief of staff. Her pension is said to be nudging £2million.
Another is senior civil servant named Nick Joicey, whose pension is around the £1million mark. Don’t recognise the name?
He’s married to chancellor Rachel Reeves. I’d imagine her pension is pretty generous, too.
It will certainly pay more than £11,350 a year, which is the point at which supposedly “wealthy” pensioners lose their Winter Fuel Payment. And Labour wonders why pensioners are so angry?