By David Osland

I can’t imagine a more boring biscuit than the non-chocolate covered iteration of McVitie’s Digestives. But they have been in production since 1892, so some people must find them an indispensable accompaniment to a cuppa.

Their initial popularity was enough to make inventor Sir Alexander Grant a rich man, and ultimately win him a small place in Labour history.

Sir Alexander had been a childhood friend of Ramsay MacDonald, who entered 10 Downing Street as Britain’s first Labour prime minister in January 1924.

In March of that year, Grant transferred the income from 30,000 shares in his firm McVitie & Price to MacDonald. Lo and behold, he got a baronetcy just a few weeks later.

In September, the Daily Mail splashed on the story. It can’t have looked any better than tales of political sleaze do today. But unlike the Zinoviev Letter, these allegations were actually true.

MacDonald was forced to issue a weasel-worded statement to the Press Association, in which he insisted: “The capital is not mine and I only technically own the shares. The matter has nothing to do with politics. Sir Alexander Grant got his baronetcy for public service.”

Of course he did. How dare the Daily Mail traduce the reputation of an obviously fine upstanding public servant?

A day later, it emerged that the money was being used to furnish the prime minister with a Daimler. MacDonald doubled down.

Actually owning a motor car would be “against the simplicity of my habits,” he explained. Why being chauffeured around in an upmarket German car didn’t contravene the simplicity of his habits, he didn’t say.

Various defences have been advanced for MacDonald’s behaviour, then and now. Blatantly selling gongs is nothing new in Westminster.

So established were the going rates for knighthoods and peerages known under MacDonald’s recent predecessor David Lloyd George that the Welsh Wizard’s fixer – a theatrical producer by the name of Maundy Gregory – might as well have openly published a price list.

The resonances with the role of Blair fundraiser Michael Levy, not for nothing popularly known as Lord Cashpoint, are immediately obvious. The practice has continued under recent Tory administrations, if thankfully somewhat less conspicuously.

But some of MacDonald’s contemporaries were sufficiently savvy to realise the serious harm the issue caused. Among them was Fabian founder Beatrice Webb.

“The bald facts look as if [MacDonald] had ‘sold a baronetcy’, not for party funds but for his own pecuniary benefit … JRM may not only have killed the Labour prime minister, he may have undermined, for a generation, the moral prestige of the Parliamentary Labour Party.”

Subsequent history shows us that the PLP has not always been a nest of sea-green incorruptibles. After four former Labour MPs were jailed in the wake of the 2009 expenses scandal, the less said about its moral prestige, the better.

But Biscuitgate – as it would automatically have been dubbed in recent decades – certainly proved injurious to Labour’s fortunes at the next general election.

Tory and Liberal canvassers routinely raised it on the doorstep, while Labour rallies were repeatedly barracked with chants of “biscuits, biscuits, biscuits”.

If you’re geeky enough to want the details on all of this, you’ll find them in David Torrance’s excellent book The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government. I’ve drawn heavily on his account.

A century ago, many Labour supporters thought a Labour government might actually introduce socialism, and expected impeccable morals from its politicians. They will surely have been disappointed.

A hundred years later, many of those that voted Labour last July will also have been hoping for a clear break with the duplicity and multiple swindles and scams that characterised the Boris Johnson era.

Rachel Reeves’ decision to appoint a Covid corruption commissioner was certainly a more popular pronouncement than her decision to axe winter fuel payments.

That makes the revelations of Keir Starmer’s acceptance of more than £100,000 worth of gifts and hospitality since he became leader of the Labour Party all the more damaging.

The freebies have ranged from designer spectacles and suits to private boxes for Arsenal matches and Taylor Swift and Coldplay gigs.

I’m not part of the hairshirt tendency on the left. I freely confess to liking the good things in life, among which I emphatically do not include Coldplay concerts.

But like the rest of the middle-class hoi polloi, I fund my Springsteen and Stones tickets myself, on take-home pay dramatically lower than the prime ministerial salary, which puts Starmer in the top 1% of earners.

Meanwhile, the public attitude towards politicians is radically more tarnished than back in the 1920s. Cynicism has replaced deference, and what Starmer has done can only boost the perennial populist chorus of ‘they’re all the same’.

I don’t go along with the narrative that Sir Keir is somehow ‘not very good at politics’. After all, he was certainly good enough to win the last Labour leadership race handsomely.

But there has been no indication that Starmer or the team around him grasp just how poorly these unforced errors have played with the electorate. A glance at recent polling will demonstrate that.

In short, Starmer had a chance to turn the page on Tories-on-the-take venality. But he contrived to blow it before even entering office.

His resort to exactly the same ‘I did nothing wrong/it was within the rules’ excuses MacDonald advanced for hobnobbing with a biscuit baron really does take the biscuit.

David Osland is a long-time leftwing journalist and author. Follow him on Twitter at @David__Osland

Image: Ramsay MacDonald. https://picryl.com/media/ramsay-macdonald-cropped-975b23. Creator: National Portrait Gallery London | Credit: National Portrait Gallery London via Picryl.com Copyright: public domain PDM 1.0 DEED Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal